Towards an intelligent surveillance system for public security at crowded places

Nowadays, safety and security of public areas has become the centre of attention, and especially after 9/11 attack. A visual surveillance for public security is proposed to meet the needs of public areas, such as shopping malls, train stations, airports, etc... Surveillance researchers from the computer vision have focused on building automated systems and have hardly adopted an approach, where human is involved in decision making with the help of computer inputs. Knowing that the fully automated systems have some advantages such as saving human power, and supporting remote monitoring, but in other hand, these systems are not often tended to work in complex environments. This thesis adopts a human-cum-machine centric approach, where this approach is followed in order to assist security personnel in the physical monitoring with the support of video surveillance. A proposed system is designed and developed, which provides security personnel with real-time information about any suspected person they want to suspect about. Using the security system's application, the officer has to identify the region within the surveilled area where the suspected person is located. Based on the region identified, the system delegates and controls nearest installed cameras to cover the region and then capture pictures of the scene. Once the suspected person is identified by the security personnel from the pictures captured, the corresponding information such as personal and contact information of the person is displayed and available to the security officers. The architecture of the system is based on web services technology, where many researches outlined the benefits of using web services in terms of scalability, reliability, and re-usability of its components. This thesis provides detailed information about the proposed system and its components, discusses the application's graphical user interface to be used by security personnel, and proposes a methodology to select and control installed security cameras to cover a region identified by security personnel