Measuring Behavior 2005: Velastin

Intelligent CCTV surveillance: Advances and limitations

S.A. Velastin

Digital Imaging Research Centre, School of Computing & Information Systems, Kingston University, Kingston-upon-Thames, United Kingdom

The installation of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in urban environments is now commonplace and well-known. The UK leads the world with an estimated 4 million public cameras installed (20% of the world's deployment). Public attitudes to these systems reflect the balance needed between two conflicting requirements:

a) Concerns over invasion of privacy and fears of authoritarian control of the population.
b) Welcoming the increased safety in public spaces and reductions in crime and antisocial behavior.

Recent events and what appears to be the effectiveness of the CCTV infrastructure in assisting law enforcers to understand how the events took place and the people involved, seem to have tipped the balance towards (b), at least momentarily.
What we should not forget however, is that such events are thankfully very rare but that there is a cumulative significant effect of mundane daily events that we need to deal with. For example, it has been estimated that what in the UK is called "antisocial behavior" costs the country around € 5000 million a year. A single London Borough (municipality) spends annually around € 1 million to remove graffiti, 44% of women feel unsafe at bus stops at night, a single bus company in a major city is known to have replaced 8,000 windows in one year and a study showed that in a single day in the UK there were around 66,000 reports of nuisance or loutish behavior. At the same time, there are reports that when CCTV has been installed there has been a 35% reduction in crime over 5 years. Indeed, crime in general is decreasing while uncivil behavior is on the increase.
It turns out that one of the major limitations of conventional CCTV systems is the impracticality of deploying sufficient number of people to be in front of television screens observing largely uneventful video. As long as this is the case, CCTV will tend to remain a reactive tool. The inability of being truly pro-active, producing timely alarms and eventually being able to prevent incidents, is what ultimately limits these systems. As a preamble to the main associated symposium, this talk will illustrate some of the efforts that the research and industrial communities are making towards realizing automated means of detecting video events involving human activity. It will show the kind of progress made but also the current limitations of this technology.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.