"Preface Video surveillance is the area of computer science devoted to real-time acquisition, processing, and management of videos coming from cameras installed in public and private areas, in order to automatically understand events happening at the monitored sites, eventually setting up an alarm. Because of the rapidly increasing number of surveillance cameras, it has become a key technology for security and safety, with applications ranging from fight against terrorism and crime, to private and publicsafety (e.g., in private buildings, transport networks, town centres, schools, and hospitals), and to the efficient management of transport networks and public facilities (e.g., traffic lights and railroad crossings). Video surveillance is an extremely interdisciplinary area, embracing the study of methods and algorithms for computer vision and pattern recognition, but also hardware for sensors and acquisition tools, computer architectures, wired and wireless communication infrastructures, and middleware. From an algorithmical standpoint, the general problem can be broken down into several steps, including motion detection, object classification, tracking, activity understanding, and semantic description, each of which poses its own challenges and hurdles for the system designers. Moreover, the scope of video surveillance is being extended to off-line multimedia analysis systems related to security and safety, thus entailing disciplines such as content-based video retrieval for visual data similarity retrieval and video mining for knowledge extraction; typical applications are in forensic video analysis and human behaviour analysis"--Provided by publisher.
Information on integrating soft computing techniques into video surveillance is widely scattered among conference papers, journal articles, and books. Bringing this research together in one source, Handbook on Soft Computing for Video Surveillance illustrates the application of soft computing techniques to different tasks in video surveillance. Worldwide experts in the field present novel solutions to video surveillance problems and discuss future trends.
After an introduction to video surveillance systems and soft computing tools, the book gives examples of neural network-based approaches for solving video surveillance tasks and describes summarization techniques for content identification. Covering a broad spectrum of video surveillance topics, the remaining chapters explain how soft computing techniques are used to detect moving objects, track objects, and classify and recognize target objects. The book also explores advanced surveillance systems under development.
Incorporating both existing and new ideas, this handbook unifies the basic concepts, theories, algorithms, and applications of soft computing. It demonstrates why and how soft computing methodologies can be used in various video surveillance problems.
