Surveillance powers of law enforcement and intelligence services in Poland

The article presents three cases from 2018. They show that in Poland there is a tendency to build strengthened surveillance powers without finding a balance between security and respect for human rights. In the first case, the Commissioner for Human Rights withdrew his application from the Constitutional Tribunal (March 2018), in which he questioned the reforms introduced in 2016. According to the Polish Ombudsman, in the Polish legal system there is still a shortage of the legal safeguards which would make sure that surveillance measures do not violate fundamental rights. In the second case, the Prosecutor General submitted one application to the Constitutional Tribunal concerning the constitutionality of obtaining of evidence of the committing of another offence different from the one covered by operational surveillance. The third case concerns two new institutions which emerged in 2018, which were granted considerable powers in terms of surveillance: the National Security Services and the Internal Supervision Bureau, which is subject to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The circumstances surrounding the emergence of these institutions will also be analyzed

Advance video analysis system and its applications

This research aims at developing an Advance Video Analysis System (AVAS) which can be used in wide range of video surveillance applications as well as to detect moving objects and human beings. The AVAS is able to detect and track interested objects along with human. It recognizes activities in an application environment, such as in a room, supermarket, car, or security checkpoint. Designing a real-time video analysis system is a complex task, as many factors including processing speed, system cost, accuracy, and robustness, need to be carefully balanced. This research has focused these factors at two levels, algorithm level and software level. Background elimination algorithm is proposed in this paper to enhance the performance of Smart Camera systems in changing background and varying lighting condition environment. Among the main features of this research some are, Event Id, Video Id, and Human Id which give detail information about the events, videos and other tracked objects. Finally, the software implementation of AVAS is applied to detect motion and then to trigger alarm for the security purposes. The system will trigger alarm once the motion is detected and when it exceeds the desire threshold value it will give warning to prevent any loss or mass destruction. Finally, we have given a number of recommendations that need to be addressed for the future growth of surveillance technologies and meeting the end-users' diversified and dynamic requirements. © EuroJournals Publishing, Inc. 2010

A survey of face detection, extraction and recognition

The goal of this paper is to present a critical survey of existing literatures on human face recognition over the last 4-5 years. Interest and research activities in face recognition have increased significantly over the past few years, especially after the American airliner tragedy on September 11 in 2001. While this growth largely is driven by growing application demands, such as static matching of controlled photographs as in mug shots matching, credit card verification to surveillance video images, identification for law enforcement and authentication for banking and security system access, advances in signal analysis techniques, such as wavelets and neural networks, are also important catalysts. As the number of proposed techniques increases, survey and evaluation becomes important

Multiple detections application for indoor tracking using PIR sensor and Kalman filter

Recently, human tracking in multiple indoor environments is getting broadly in demand to enhance security surveillance. Traditional passive video surveillance shown that it has working ineffectively nowadays because the number of cameras has exceeded the ability of operators to monitor them. In this paper, we proposed methods of detecting human presence using Pyroelectric Infrared (PIR) Motion Sensor and tracking people in multiple indoor locations using Kalman filter-based estimation. The proposed method is implemented to analyze the movement of people within the prescribed area and the result will be presented in footprint mapping of the said area. This will further enhanced building security surveillance especially at the sensitive or restricted areas. Experiments for single target tracking in several areas are carried out to verify the application of the developed system. As the results, the maximum error for tracking trajectory reduced from 0.28m to 0.19m and average error for tracking trajectory also reduced from 0.10m to 0.07m after using Kalman filter estimation algorithm

Vehicle Tracking using Video Cameras

In Malaysia, road crime cases keep increasing days to days and the resolved cases are very minimal. This leads to how importance it is to improve our security system, especially in vehicle‟s surveillance system. In a common security application, human observation plays an important role as they need to monitor the camera‟s output on a TV and detect when any expected events occur. However, relying on human‟s eyes is not a reliable system as the technology now allows an automatic detection system. The „Vehicles Tracking System Using Video Cameras‟ is the basic solution to those problems. The scope for this project is narrowed down to moving vehicles on the road. The main idea of this project is to track vehicle using their colour properties. Different vehicle‟s image has different colour properties. These colour properties will set as an identification of a vehicle. This identification will be utilised to track down the identified vehicle earlier. MATLAB is utilised for the algorithm development. In MATLAB, background subtraction is performed as to extract the foreground image from the background image. The foreground image will be further analysed and processed to gather as much as data. The data will include the colour properties of the image. The result shows that information stored in colour properties are sufficient to be used for vehicles tracking

Quantum surveillance and 'shared secrets'. A biometric step too far? CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe, July 2010

It is no longer sensible to regard biometrics as having neutral socio-economic, legal and political impacts. Newer generation biometrics are fluid and include behavioural and emotional data that can be combined with other data. Therefore, a range of issues needs to be reviewed in light of the increasing privatisation of ‘security’ that escapes effective, democratic parliamentary and regulatory control and oversight at national, international and EU levels, argues Juliet Lodge, Professor and co-Director of the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence at the University of Leeds, U