There is a growing interest in the development and deployment of
surveillance systems in public and private locations. Conventional
approaches rely on the installation of wide area CCTV (Closed Circuit
Television), but the explosion in the numbers of cameras that have to be
monitored, the increasing costs of providing monitoring personnel and
the limitations that humans have to maintain sustained levels of
concentration severely limit the effectiveness of these systems.
Advances in information and communication technologies, such as computer
vision for face recognition and human behaviour analysis, digital
annotation and storage of video, transmission of video/audio streams
over wired and wireless networks, can potentially provide significant
improvements in this field.
The book consists of a coherent selection of extended versions of
presentations made in two successful IEE symposia on Intelligent
Distributed Surveillance Systems (IDSS). It surveys recent development
in distributed intelligent surveillance systems and brings together the
work of researchers and engineers, system integrators and managers of
public and private organisations likely to use such systems.