Automatic Components of Integrated CCTV Surveillance Systems: Functionality, Accuracy and Confidence

Recent societal events and advances in computer vision technology have lead to the development of a variety of automatic surveillance systems. Despite their arguable success in the laboratory, fully automatic methods remain unsuitable for use in real life situations due to the complex nature of the context in which they must operate. Current techniques may, however, be immediately valuable if deployed as components of integrated human-automatic CCTV surveillance systems. It is therefore important to understand the potential of current automatic methods and provide design recommendations for semi-automatic systems, so that work to date can be exploited in full. An experiment was conducted to investigate the importance of the functionality and level of accuracy of, and feedback provided by, the automatic component of an integrated, semi-automatic CCTV surveillance system. The operatorspsila workload and spare attentional capacity was measured to investigate the effect of each of these factors. Results showed significant reduction in workload when reliable confidence information is fed back. Increases in accuracy and variation in functionality failed to produce evidence of change in workload.