This paper overviews a new system, the “Owens
Tracker,” for automated identification of suspicious
pedestrian activity in a car-park.
Centralized CCTV systems relay multiple video streams
to a central point for monitoring by an operator. The
operator receives a continuous stream of information,
mostly related to normal activity, making it difficult to
maintain concentration at a sufficiently high level.
While it is difficult to place quantitative boundaries on
the number of scenes and time period over which
effective monitoring can be performed, Wallace and
Diffley [1] give some guidance, based on empirical and
anecdotal evidence, suggesting that the number of
cameras monitored by an operator be no greater than 16,
and that the period of effective monitoring may be as
low as 30 minutes before recuperation is required.
An intelligent video surveillance system should
therefore act as a filter, censuring inactive scenes and
scenes showing normal activity. By presenting the
operator only with unusual activity his/her attention is
effectively focussed, and the ratio of cameras to
operators can be increased.
The Owens Tracker learns to recognize environmentspecific
normal behaviour, and refers sequences of
unusual behaviour for operator attention. The system
was developed using standard low-resolution CCTV
cameras operating in the car-parks of Doxford Park
Industrial Estate (Sunderland, Tyne and Wear), and
targets unusual pedestrian behaviour.
The modus operandi of the system is to highlight
excursions from a learned model of normal behaviour in
the monitored scene. The system tracks objects and
extracts their centroids; behaviour is defined as the
trajectory traced by an object centroid; normality as the
trajectories typically encountered in the scene. The
essential stages in the system are: segmentation of
objects of interest; disambiguation and tracking of
multiple contacts, including the handling of occlusion
and noise, and successful tracking of objects that
“merge” during motion; identification of unusual
trajectories. These three stages are discussed in more
detail in the following sections, and the system
performance is then evaluated
