A video surveillance architecture for alarm generation and video sequences retrieval

This paper presents a system for automatic videosurveillance applications. The system has been designed to monitor outdoor environments such as car parks or streets, providing the human operator with a symbolic description of the scene. The final task of the architecture is to automatically provide alarms when specific events of interest are detected. In this way the level of automation of the system is increased as well as overall performances. One of the main drawback of traditional video surveillance systems lies in the alarm generation. This task has to be visually performed by the human operators with intrinsic limitation. The possibility of having this process automated is here described within the design of an architecture capable of acquire, process and successfully store data coming from one or more sensors.