Sensor network is broadly used across industries to monitor equipment conditions. Huge volume of information collected from a large set of sensors poses great challenges to make inferences for prediction of significant events. We collaborate with a US Class I railway company and apply advanced analytics techniques to be able to predict alarms associated with catastrophic equipment failures several days ahead of time. We use the case study in railroad to demonstrate the techniques to address the big data concerns. In addition, the alarm-prediction rule development needs to satisfy the critical constraints to meet the high standards of prediction accuracy combined with human interpretability in railroad industry. We build customized SVM algorithm to meet the requirements. By adding a unique and remarkable feature of human interpretability to the rules we develop, our solution is able to facilitate the decision making process of operators and lead to efficient operational decision support.

The class of spatial query over the networks has been extensively studied in the past decade. However, most of the current research focuses on the single objective solution, which is based on the optimization of one objective function. In this paper, we propose a framework to address one type of the multi-objective spatial query problems (i.e., the range query) on the road networks. Towards this end, we utilize a filtering and refinement paradigm to significantly prune the search space and localize the expensive refinement operation within a small candidate space. We experimentally verified the applicability and efficiency of the proposed method with real world datasets.

Tracking-based approaches for abandoned object detection often become unreliable in complex surveillance videos due to occlusions, lighting changes, and other factors. We present a new framework to robustly and efficiently detect abandoned and removed objects based on background subtraction (BGS) and foreground analysis with complement of tracking to reduce false positives. In our system, the background is modeled by three Gaussian mixtures. In order to handle complex situations, several improvements are implemented for shadow removal, quick-lighting change adaptation, fragment reduction, and keeping a stable update rate for video streams with different frame rates. Then, the same Gaussian mixture models used for BGS are employed to detect static foreground regions without extra computation cost. Furthermore, the types of the static regions (abandoned or removed) are determined by using a method that exploits context information about the foreground masks, which significantly outperforms previous edge-based techniques. Based on the type of the static regions and user-defined parameters (e.g., object size and abandoned time), a matching method is proposed to detect abandoned and removed objects. A person-detection process is also integrated to distinguish static objects from stationary people. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed method is tested on IBM Smart Surveillance Solutions for public safety applications in big cities and evaluated by several public databases, such as The Image library for intelligent detection systems (i-LIDS) and IEEE Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance Workshop (PETS) 2006 datasets. The test and evaluation demonstrate our method is efficient to run in real-time, while being robust to quick-lighting changes and occlusions in complex environments.

Urban environments present unique challenges from the perspective of surveillance and security. Threat activity in urban environments tends to be very similar to background activity, while the volume of activity is often very high. The widespread geographical area presents issues from the perspective of response. These characteristics of urban environments create challenges to traditional applications of video analytics technologies and opens up opportunities for novel approaches. This paper explores the applicability of video analytics in various scenarios presented in urban surveillance situations. We also describe novel technical solutions to some of the challenges of urban surveillance.

Virtual boundary (tripwire) crossing detection is an essential component in almost all modern digital visual surveillance systems. In this paper, we address the problem of achieving reliable tripwire crossing results in crowded scenarios and propose a new technique for the replacement of conventional tracking based tripwire techniques. We introduce the concept of "ground patches" which are a set of sub-regions sampled around the defined tripwire. Each ground patch is declared active when it is occupied by one or more foreground objects. Temporal and appearance features are extracted from each of the patches, and they are correlated across the virtual boundary to determine if a crossing occurs. The proposed method has been applied in situations with different traffic loads, and promising results are obtained.

We present a novel framework for recognizing repetitive sequential events performed by human actors with strong temporal dependencies and potential parallel overlap. Our solution incorporates sub-event (or primitive) detectors and a spatiotemporal model for sequential event changes. We develop an effective and efficient method to integrate primitives into a set of sequential events where strong temporal constraints are imposed on the ordering of the primitives. In particular, the combination process is approached as an optimization problem. A specialized Viterbi algorithm is designed to learn and infer the target sequential events and handle the event overlap simultaneously. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we report detailed quantitative analysis on a large set of cashier checkout activities in a retail store.

A significant portion of retail shrink is attributed to employees and occurs around the point of sale (POS). In this paper, we target a major type of retail fraud in surveillance videos, known as sweethearting (or fake scan), where a cashier intentionally fails to enter one or more items into the transaction in an attempt to get free merchandise for the customer. We first develop a motion-based algorithm to identify video segments as candidates for primitive events at the POS. We then apply spatio-temporal features to recognize true primitive events from the candidates and prune those falsely alarmed. In particular, we learn location-aware event models by Multiple-Instance Learning to address the location-sensitive issues that appear in our problem. Finally, we validate the entire transaction by combining primitive events according to temporal ordering constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on data captured from a real grocery store.

Video analytics have recently emerged as a promising technique of retail fraud detection for loss prevention. Efficient video analytic algorithms are highly desired for a practical fraud detection system. In this paper, we present a real-time algorithm for recognizing a cashier's actions at the point of sale (POS), which can be further used to analyze cashier behaviors for identifying fraudulent incidents. The algorithm uses a set of simple but effective features derived from a global representation of motion energy called polar motion map (PMM). These features capture the motion patterns exhibited in a cashier's actions as a focused beam of motion energy, characterizing the actions as the extension and retraction movement of the cashier's arm with respect to a prespecified region. Our algorithm demonstrates comparable accuracy against one of the state-of-the-art event recognition techniques while running significantly faster.

In virtually every business context there is a need to establish some form of monitoring system to ensure that employees comply with business processes and policies. Compliance failures range from organized theft to gaps in procedure that can be easily remedied through retraining. It is clearly important for businesses to capture and record these deviations to minimize loss prevention and maximize workplace safety and efficiency. In this workshop, we discuss the growing problem of compliance failure and how our system addresses this problem in a retail context to detect checkout-related fraud through the integration of visual and non-visual data.

We propose a novel framework for searching for people in surveillance environments. Rather than relying on face recognition technology, which is known to be sensitive to typical surveillance conditions such as lighting changes, face pose variation, and low-resolution imagery, we approach the problem in a different way: we search for people based on a parsing of human parts and their attributes, including facial hair, eyewear, clothing color, etc. These attributes can be extracted using detectors learned from large amounts of training data. A complete system that implements our framework is presented. At the interface, the user can specify a set of personal characteristics, and the system then retrieves events that match the provided description. For example, a possible query is ¿show me the bald people who entered a given building last Saturday wearing a red shirt and sunglasses.¿ This capability is useful in several applications, such as finding suspects or missing people. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we present extensive experiments on a set of images collected from the Internet, on infrared imagery, and on two-and-a-half months of video from a real surveillance environment. We are not aware of any similar surveillance system capable of automatically finding people in video based on their fine-grained body parts and attributes.

Moving object classification in far-field video is a key component of smart surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose a reliable system for person-vehicle classification which works well in challenging real-word conditions, including the presence of shadows, low resolution imagery, perspective distortions, arbitrary camera viewpoints, and groups of people. Our system runsin real-time (30 Hz) on conventional machines and has low memory consumption. We achieved accurate results by relying on powerful discriminative features, including a novel measure of object deformation based on differences of histograms of oriented gradients. We also provide an interactive user interface, enabling users to specify regions of interest for each class and correct for perspective distortions by specifying different sizes indifferent positions of the camera view. Finally, we use anautomatic adaptation process to continuously update the parameters of the system so that its performance increases for a particular environment. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in standard dataset and a variety of video clips captured with our surveillance cameras.

Many facial image analysis methods rely on learning-based techniques such as Adaboost or SVMs to project classifiers based on the selection of local image filters (e.g., Haar and Gabor filters) from large sets of training data. In general, the learning process consists of selecting discriminative image filters from a large feature pool that contains filters uniformly sampled from the parameter space. In this paper, we argue that we are able to improve these methods by incorporating a local feature adaptation technique prior to learning, which generates a more compact and meaningful pool of image filters, consequently reducing both learning and detection/recognition computational costs, while at the same time improving accuracies. In the first stage of our approach, local feature adaptation is carried out by a nonlinear optimization method that determines image filter parameters (such as position, orientation and scale) in order to match the geometrical structure of each training sample. In the second stage, Adaboost feature selection technique is applied to the adapted feature pool to obtain the final set of discriminative local image filters. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework in the face detection domain. In the experiments, we have applied our method using a pool of wavelet features, including Haar and Gabor filters. The results showed that with local feature adaptation, significant improvements in terms of detection accuracy and computational cost reduction are achieved over learning based on the same features sampled uniformly from the parameter space.

Surveillance video is used in two key modes, watching for known threats in real-time and searching for events of interest after the fact. Typically, real-time alerting is a localized function, e.g. airport security center receives and reacts to a “perimeter breach alert”, while investigations often tend to encompass a large number of geographically distributed cameras like the London bombing, or Washington sniper incidents. Enabling effective search of surveillance video for investigation & preemption, involves indexing the video along multiple dimensions. This paper presents a framework for surveillance search which includes, video parsing, indexing and query mechanisms. It explores video parsing techniques which automatically extract index data from video, indexing which stores data in relational tables, retrieval which uses SQL queries to retrieve events of interest and the software architecture that integrates these technologies.

We describe a set of tools for retail analytics based on a combination of video understanding and transaction-log. Tools are provided for loss prevention (returns fraud and cashier fraud), store operations (customer counting) and merchandising (display effectiveness). Results are presented on returns fraud and customer counting.

This paper presents reliable techniques for detecting, tracking, and storing keyframes of people in surveillance video. The first component of our system is a novel face detector algorithm, which is based on first learning local adaptive features for each training image, and then using Adaboost learning to select the most general features for detection. This method provides a powerful mechanism for combining multiple features, allowing faster training time and better detection rates. The second component is a face tracking algorithm that interleaves multiple view-based classifiers along the temporal domain in a video sequence. This interleaving technique, combined with a correlation-based tracker, enables fast and robust face tracking over time. Finally, the third component of our system is a keyframe selection method that combines a person classifier with a face classifier. The basic idea is to generate a person keyframe in case the face is not visible, in order to reduce the number of false negatives. We performed quantitatively evaluation of our techniques on standard datasets and on surveillance videos captured by a camera over several days.

Pervasive sensor based systems are transforming Information Technology systems from being transactional in nature to being observational in nature. Observational systems are inherently distributed and capture information at a much finer grain of space and time. Enabling and building such systems also poses many technology challenges, extracting information from sensor signals, indexing and searching sensor meta-data, data mining and scalability. In this paper we use S3: the IBM smart surveillance system as an example of an observational system to explore several of these issues through real world deployment examples.

Automatic counting of people, entering or exiting a region of interest, is very important for both business and security applications. This paper introduces an automatic and robust people counting system which can count multiple people who interact in the region of interest, by using only one camera. Two-level hierarchical tracking is employed. For cases not involving merges or splits, a fast blob tracking method is used. In order to deal with interactions among people in a more thorough and reliable way, the system uses the mean shift tracking algorithm. Using the first-level blob tracker in general, and employing the mean shift tracking only in the case of merges and splits saves power and makes the system computationally efficient. The system setup parameter can be automatically learned in a new environment from a 3 to 5 minute-video with people going in or out of the target region one at a time. With a 2 GHz Pentium machine, the system runs at about 33 fps on 320times240 images without code optimization. Average accuracy rates of 98.5% and 95% are achieved on videos with normal traffic flow and videos with many cases of merges and splits, respectively

As smart surveillance technology becomes a critical component in security infrastructures, the system architecture assumes a critical importance. This paper considers the example of smart surveillance in an airport environment. We start with a threat model for airports and use this to derive the security requirements. These requirements are used to motivate an open-standards based architecture for surveillance. We discuss the critical aspects of this architecture and its implementation in the IBM S3 smart surveillance system. Demo results from a pilot deployment in Hawthorne, NY are presented.

We present a new method to robustly and efficiently analyze foreground when we detect background for a fixed camera view by using mixture of Gaussians models and multiple cues. The background is modeled by three Gaussian mixtures as in the work of Stauffer and Grimson (1999). Then the intensity and texture information are integrated to remove shadows and to enable the algorithm working for quick lighting changes. For foreground analysis, the same Gaussian mixture model is employed to detect the static foreground regions without using any tracking or motion information. Then the whole static regions are pushed back to the background model to avoid a common problem in background subtraction /spl times/ fragmentation (one object becomes multiple parts). The method was tested on our real time video surveillance system. It is robust and run about 130 fpsfor color images and 150 fps for grayscale images at size 160/spl times/120 on a 2GB Pentium IV machine with MMX optimization.

Popular clustering algorithms, such as K-means (KM) and expectation maximization (EM), are sensitive to the initialization of cluster centers. In contrast, recently proposed K-harmonic means (KHM) algorithm is more robust to the randomness of the initialization. However, KHM works best when the dimensionality of the data (N) is small (usually less than 8). Because the dimensionality of features that are used for many clustering problems in image/video and speech processing is large, the benefits of KHM cannot be exploited. Based upon this observation, this paper proposes a novel method to employ KHM for high-dimensional data so as to realize initialization-independent clustering. The proposed method employs efficient spectral clustering techniques whereby the affinity matrix of the data is decomposed into its eigenvectors and k (total number of clusters) eigenvectors corresponding to the k largest eigenvalues are retained. That is, we represent N-D data by k-D transformed data when k < N and propose to employ KHM over this k-D transformed data. The assumption of k < N indeed encompasses a large number of significant video processing and computer vision problems where the use of KHM was not beneficial before. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed algorithm for face clustering in the domains where the number of persons (k) is not large, such as anchorperson grouping, video-based speaker clustering in videoconferencing, and identity-based tracking in small office environments.

The detection and tracking of people lie at the heart of many current and near-future applications of computer vision. We describe a background subtraction system designed to detect moving objects in a wide variety of conditions, and a second system to detect objects moving in front of moving backgrounds. Detected foreground regions are tracked with a tracking system which can initiate real-time alarms and generate a smart surveillance index which can be searched to find interesting events in stored video

The level of security at a facility is directly related to how well the facility can keep track of "who is where". The "who" part of this question is typically addressed through the use of face images for recognition either by a person or a computer face recognition system. The "where" part of this question can be addressed through 3D position tracking. The "who is where" problem is inherently multi-scale, wide angle views are needed for location estimation and high resolution face images for identification. A number of other people tracking challenges like activity understanding are multiscale in nature. An effective system to answer "who is where?" must acquire face images without constraining the users and must closely associate the face images with the 3D path of the person. Our solution to this problem uses computer controlled pan-tilt-zoom cameras driven by a 3D wide-baseline stereo tracking system. The pan-tilt-zoom cameras automatically acquire zoomed-in views of a person's head, while the person is in motion within the monitored space.

Projected interfaces are gaining popularity as a means of access to information anywhere in a space without the need for special devices or monitors. In this context, it is of particular interest to automatically steer the projected interface to appropriate surfaces based on the location of the user in the space. This requires the users be tracked precisely, and in real time, as they move about in the environment, in spite of continuously varying and moving projected imagery in the background. This is challenging as the projection regions also appear as foreground. This paper presents a geometric image masking technique that separately segments out regions corresponding to the user and projected imagery in multiple camera views, and enables precise three-dimensional tracking of the user.

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Autonomous robot navigation requires the solution of several problems like obstacle avoidance and road following. Traditionally, the problem of obstacle avoidance has been solved by using range information acquired through some form of range measurements like laser range cameras or vision based range estimation. This paper presents a novel approach for obstacle avoidance which does not require true range measurement. Obstacle information is acquired using a single color camera. Detected obstacles are projected into 3D grid derived from the camera geometry and a locally flat earth model for the terrain. A weighted polar histogram technique is used to generate the vehicle steering angle based on the current grid information.>

The data driven, bottom up approach to video segmentation has ignored the inherent structure that exists in video. This work uses the model driven approach to digital video segmentation. Mathematical models of video based on video production techniques are formulated. These models are used to classify the edit effects used in video and film production. The classes and models are used to systematically design the feature detectors for detecting edit effects in digital video. Digital video segmentation is formulated as a feature based classification problem. Experimental results from segmenting cable television programming with cuts, fades, dissolves and page translate edits are presented.