An Expert System for Surveillance Picture Understanding

The last stage of any type of automatic surveillance system is the interpretation of the acquired information from the sensors. This work focuses on the interpretation of motion pictures taken from a surveillance camera, i.e.; image understanding. An expert system is presented which can describe in a natural language like, simple human activity in the field of view of a surveillance camera. The system has three different components: a pre-processing module for image segmentation and feature extraction, an object identification expert system (static model), and an action identification expert system (dynamic temporal model). The system was tested on a video segment of a pedestrian passageway taken by a surveillance camera.