Video surveillance for hazardous conditions using sensor networks

One major duty for fire or law enforcement agencies is to respond rapidly to emergency services, crime scenes, and disasters. In many cases, they have to face life-threatening conditions for locating evidence, conducting investigation, or rescuing innocent civilians in an unfamiliar, unstable, and dangerous environment. We propose to develop a system based on the following considerations. 1) Sensors such as tracker and cameras are scattered along the area for capturing subjects´ location and monitoring events. Those sensors being coordinated via wireless communication can make an intimate connection to the immediate environment and react to events in a remote area instantly. 2) Network and sensors act in a cooperative and adaptive manner to acquire information and send it back to centralized control center for data fusion and decision-making. Therefore, the sensor control can be updated and field of view (FOV) from each camera can be optimized. 3) Central control embedded with automated scene analysis and subject behavior detection interprets video camera signals constantly and informs agencies when certain events are detected.