VIEWS: computer vision for surveillance applications

Summary form only given. The ESPRIT project VIEWS (Visual Inspection and Evaluation of Wide-area Scenes) [project 2152] demonstrates computer vision systems for real-time surveillance of outdoor dynamic scenes in constrained situations. Two domains, viz. ground traffic at airports and road traffic have been selected for demonstration. For applications within these domains, inspection refers to a monitoring activity which provides a description of the scene in spatio-temporal terms, while evaluation refers to the higher-level activity of surveillance which produces conceptual descriptions of the scene of meaning to the end user. Both levels of description are derived primarily from image sequence data but other, nonvisual, data may also be input. The term wide-area refers not only to the spatial extent of the possible interactions but also to their number, for example a large network of roads or a junction in an urban area, or the whole or part of the airside of an airport