Drone Systems for Factory Security and Surveillance

Nowadays, when preparations and implementations are under way for smart cities, the use of drone systems in the safety of factories has come to the fore. Factories and industrial areas are complex systems. Physical control is essential for their optimal and safe operation. Most of the inspections can be performed with the use of human resources. However, efforts should be made to minimize the human factor in order to make the system as automated and optimized as possible. Pre-programmed routine tasks can be performed by drones, both indoors and outdoors. Dedicated drones are already in use around industrial facilities, primarily for facility protection. However, in enclosed halls, it is not easy to provide these tools with routine tasks, because indoor labor – material handling, reconnaissance, and accident-free transport – requires orientation. Besides the production lines and inside warehouse buildings, drones are already commonly used to perform smaller tasks, but the goal is to ensure the right ratio in the human-machine relationship. In their technical implementation, modern drones are assisted by various sensor systems (lidar, ultrasound, camera) that they are equipped with. This article presents the application of task-specific drones in industrial areas, both indoors and outdoors

Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD

Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by ‘open networks’, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings

Autonomous UAV for suspicious action detection using pictorial human pose estimation and classification

Visual autonomous systems capable of monitoring crowded areas and alerting the authorities in occurrence of a suspicious action can play a vital role in controlling crime rate. Previous atte mpts have been made to monitor crime using posture recognition but nothing exclusive to investigating actions of people in large populated area has been cited. In order resolve this shortcoming, we propose an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) visual surveillance system that locates humans in image frames followed by pose estimation using weak constraints on position, appearance of body parts and image parsing. The estimated pose, represented as a pictorial structure, is flagged using the proposed Hough Orientation Calculator (HOC) on close resemblance with any pose in the suspicious action dataset. The robustness of the system is demonstrated on videos recorded using a UAV with no prior knowledge of background, lighting or location and scale of the human in the image. The system produces an accuracy of 71% and can also be applied on various other video sources such as CCTV camera

Mass Transit: Where Security and Sustainability Meet

As it becomes apparent that increasing sustainability is a requirement to be a leading city in modern, globalized society, public and private actors are improving mass transit networks in cities around the world. At the same time, the threat of international terrorism is a security concern which must be addressed by modern cities, particularly those in Western countries like the United States and members of the European Union. This thesis looks at how mass transit, where sustainability and security converge, is dealing with these two realities of the twenty-first century, both of which have become significant issues only in recent decades. Brief histories of transit and terrorism are given prior to a more thorough analysis of security measures that have been taken by cities already, as well as some measures that could be taken in the future.Master of Art

An approach for joint estimation of physical and logical security by semantic modelling

Key activities in critical systems are the monitoring, observation and comprehension of different phenomena, aimed at providing an updated and meaningful description of the monitored scenario, as well as its possible evolutions, to enable proper decisions and countermeasures for the protection and safety of people and things. The threats coming from many different sources, internally and externally. The diffusion of new technologies have made more accessible the assets of a system. In this thesis we demonstrate that the use of a semantic model for the information management it is suitable in order to meet these issues. In particular, thesis proposes and implement a methodology and approach for the early situation awareness recognizing a threat situation on time, for decision support to automatically activate recovery strategies. The threat on which the thesis focus on are regarded the logical and physical security. In particular for the logical security estimation will be presented a an approach guided by metrics. Then will be presented some results and example of real application

Resilience, security, and the railway station: a unique case study of the current and future resilience to security threats

Major railway stations in England and Wales are highly networked and open locations, frequently crowded, and are vulnerable to criminal and terrorist activities. Successive Government policies and agendas have sought to lessen this susceptibility, by promoting the understanding of and the application of resilience and security measures. Thus, the complex stakeholders are responsibilised (Garland, 1996) and urged to integrate and merge resilience, crime prevention and counter-terrorism measures into their governance, and operational policies and agendas. The aim of this research is to determine and examine the interdependencies and boundaries of the multiple stakeholders within St Pancras International Railway Station (SPIRS), and to analyse how their governance, operational and legislative requirements, and agendas influence current and future resilience of complex Category A railway stations to human malign security threats. Through a unique single case study of SPIRS, qualitative data was collected from thirty-two stakeholder participants, sampled for their expert opinion and experience. Data was also collected via documents and observations. SPIRS interconnected and complex stakeholders were represented using stakeholder analysis and mapping to create an original and innovative map highlighting those who can influence and impact the resilience of the space to human malign security threats. From the thematic analysis of the data, the overarching themes exposed the resilience within SPIRS operates in an uncertain legal space, competing with disparate institutional processes creating a gulf between reality and rhetoric of the responsibilisation of resilience and security strategies. The blurred boundaries of responsibility and understanding of the resilience and security agendas within SPIRS created tension between the national and local level stakeholders. The research adds an original and novel contribution to knowledge, as through contemporary empirical evidence it has established the political rhetoric of responsibilisation (Garland, 1996) for resilience and security policies are inconsistent and contradictory with the reality of how these transpire in an ambiguous operational and legal space such as SPIRS. Regardless of the mapped interdependencies between the multiple stakeholders and their interconnecting operational and legislative obligations, there is a definite absence of a clear and united approach to resilience, with concerns being dealt with by multiple stakeholders and policies. The research has revealed the complications and disparities the complex and multiple stakeholders face implementing policy and subsequently institutional changes in a cohesive manner. The findings of the research necessitate transformations in established organisational procedures, thus ensuring these interdependencies are dealt with now to make certain the effectual incorporation and integration of agendas and strategies are unified, and which maintain the resilience of Category A railway stations and SPIRS for future generations