RECENTDEVELOPMENTS INVIDEOSURVEILLANCE  EditedbyHazemEl‐Alfy            Recent Developments in Video Surveillance Edited by Hazem El-Alfy Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2012 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. As for readers, this license allows users to download, copy and build upon published chapters even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. Notice Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published chapters. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained in the book. Publishing Process Manager Marija Radja Technical Editor Teodora Smiljanic Cover Designer InTech Design Team First published April, 2012 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechopen.com Recent Developments in Video Surveillance, Edited by Hazem El-Alfy p. cm. ISBN 978-953-51-0468-1   Contents  Preface VII Chapter 1 Compressive Sensing in Visual Tracking 3 Garrett Warnell and Rama Chellappa Chapter 2 A Construction Method for Automatic Human Tracking System with Mobile Agent Technology 17 Hiroto Kakiuchi, Kozo Tanigawa, Takao Kawamura and Kazunori Sugahara Chapter 3 Appearance-Based Retrieval for Tracked Objects in Surveillance Videos 39 Thi-Lan Le, Monique Thonnat and Alain Boucher Chapter 4 Quality Assessment in Video Surveillance 57 Mikołaj Leszczuk, Piotr Romaniak and Lucjan Janowski Chapter 5 Intelligent Surveillance System Based on Stereo Vision for Level Crossings Safety Applications 75 Nizar Fakhfakh, Louahdi Khoudour, Jean-Luc Bruyelle and El-Miloudi El-Koursi Chapter 6 Behavior Recognition Using any Feature Space Representation of Motion Trajectories 101 Shehzad Khalid  Preface  Surveillancesystemshavebecomeanessentialpartinmostestablishmentsnowadays. Therearemanyusestothesesystemsinnationalsecurity,safetyinpublicareas,flow control in crowded scenes, private safety and in providing special care for the aged and disabled. At the heart ofany surveillance system are video cam eras which have had their numbers significantly multiply over the last decade,thanks to advances in digitalnetworks andautomated videoprocessing.This hasresulted inan abundance ofavailablesurveillancevideowhichmadetheprocessofmonitoringthembyhuman operatorsnotonlyoutdatedbutalsopracticallyinfeasible.Severalmethodshavebeen develope dtoautomatethedetectionandreportingofscenes,eventsandsubjectsthat satisfyapplicationspecificrequirements. The purpose of this book is to collect recent advances in select areas of video surveillance. Research in that area usually combines results from machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering, stochastic model ing, signal processing in additiontopattern recognitionanddigital image/videoprocessing.Solvingproblems related to video surveillance often requires the reconciliation between several contradicting objectives. This makes it a challenging task and also an open research areawherenovelsolutionsarecontinuallypresentedtoovercomeearliershortcomings butstillwithoutreachingafi nalsolution. Thebookisorganizedintosixchaptersoutlinedasfollows: Chapter 1 addresses the challenges that face surveillance applications due to the increased availability ofvisual datato beprocessed.  Asa casestudy, the problemof visual trackingis presented, its classicaltechniques are described and the difficulties thatthesetechniqueshavetodealwithduetoincreasedvisualdataareillustrated.The emerging theory of compressive sensing is then introduced as a solution to these challenges, applying it to the successive stages of object tracking. Unlike the mathematical oriented approach used earlier, Chapter 2 presents a software engineering approach to the problem of tracking. In p articular, the technology of mobileagentsisappliedto theproblemoftrackingobjectsas theymovebetweenthe fields of view of several cameras. The challenge here is to recover and maintain the identitiesoftargets lostby thesy stem.Neighborhoodnodedetermination techniques areintroduced,analyzedandcompared. VIII Preface Chapter 3 surveys most recent advances in the area of indexing surveillance video. The challenges in the retrieval of tracked objects from video are presented. Then, existingand suggestedsolutionsare evaluated.Thisbrings ustoan importantaspect ofvideosurveillance:thedifficultyincomparingandevaluatingresultsduetothela ck ofstandards.Subjective assessmentofthe qualityof surveillancevideois yetanother emergingarea presentedinthis bookand isthe topicof Chapter4. Itis comparedto earlier qualitative assessment approaches such asʺuser satisfactionʺ or other quantitative measures of quality deterioration versus frame per seco nd rates. In contrast,thesuggested assessmentmethodfocusesonrecognitionanddiscrimination taskswhichfitvideosurveillanceneedsmoreadequately. Chapter5presentsanimportantapplicationofvideosurveillanceintheareaofpublic safety, namely at railroad crossings. Current safety settings include sensor triggered devices that detect objects crossing rail tracks when a train is approaching (danger zone). The su ggested approach, however, uses stereo color surveillance cameras to accurately detect, in 3D, obstacles that are either moving or stopped in the danger zone. A novel background subtraction technique that uses color information is developed and, in addition, the chapter contains a clear presentation of a wealth of  classical topics in computer vision, such as stereo matching, segmentation and tracking.ThebookconcludesinChapter6withanapplicationineventunderstanding (event modeling) which lies at the edge between machine learning and computer vision.Ithighlightsthe commonchallengewithin thecomputervisioncommunityof choosinganappropriatedatarepresentation.Asuitablerepresentationresultsinmore efficientandaccuratedataprocessing.Thisisillustratedinthechapterusingafeature space representation for motion trajectories. Clustering of trajectories is then performedmoreefficientlyandis usedtodetectoutlierswhicharetypicallyreported assuspiciousactivity. Thechaptersof thisbook comprisemultipleareasofvideosurveillanceranging from classical computer vision areas of video segmentation, stereo matching, anomaly detection and video indexing to recently emerging areas such as quality assessment and compressive sensing. Recent developments in those areas are presented along withpractica lreal lifeapplications.Still, eachchapter containsa clearpresentation of theareaitcoverswithreferencestoearlierrelatedwork.Thismakesthebookavailable for awide range of readers.Academicresearchers willfind a reliablecompilation of relevant literature in addition to timely pointers to current advances in the field of video surveillance. Industry practitioners will find useful hints about state‐of‐the‐art applications. The book also provides directions for open problems where further advancescanbepursued. Acknowledgements I am indebted tomany people who assisted me in the different processing stages of this book. In particular, I would lik e to acknowledge the editorial staff for their professionalism and patience. I also extend special thanks to Behjat Siddiquie, PhD Preface IX (Computer Scientist at SRI International, USA) and Vlad I. Morariu, PhD (Research Associate at the University of Maryland, USA) for reviewing several chapters and providinghelpfulcomments. April2012 HazemEl‐Alfy Dept.ofEngineeringMathematicsandPhysics FacultyofEngineering,AlexandriaUniversity Alexandria, EGYPT