Determining operational measures from multi-camera surveillance systems using soft biometrics

CCTV and surveillance networks are increasingly being used for operational as well as security tasks. One emerging area of technology that lends itself to operational analytics is soft biometrics. Soft biometrics can be used to describe a person and detect them throughout a sparse multi-camera network. This enables them to be used to perform tasks such as determining the time taken to get from point to point, and the paths taken through an environment by detecting and matching people across disjoint views. However, in a busy environment where there are 100´s if not 1000´s of people such as an airport, attempting to monitor everyone is highly unrealistic. In this paper we propose an average soft biometric, that can be used to identity people who look distinct, and are thus suitable for monitoring through a large, sparse camera network. We demonstrate how an average soft biometric can be used to identify unique people to calculate operational measures such as the time taken to travel from point to point.