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The Surveillance of Unattended Baggage and the
Identification and Tracking of the Owner, (SUBITO), project was
a research & development project funded by the European Commission
Framework 7 programme. Classified as a European Union capability
project it was designed to research and further develop novel
technology to achieve a set of top level objectives, namely:
- • Fast detection of baggage that has been abandoned,
- • Fast identification of the individual who left the baggage, and
- • Fast determination of their location or path they followed.
The project was guided by end-user driven
requirements to ensure that security personnel receive the
technologies they need in order to deliver improved threat security.
The system requirements
were derived from an understanding of the current user perspective
to unattended baggage threat scenarios and the logic applied to
identify alarm and non-alarm conditions. This allowed a system architecture to be developed which
was scalable to any size of installation and would be able to
perform with the key measures which a fielded system should attain
in a real application. A theoretical Privacy Impact assessment
was performed on the developed architecture and recommendations
made as to how privacy issues be addressed in future work in this
area. The wider social and legal
aspects of the technology have also been studied.
The development of the system architecture was
supported by a series of additional studies which analysed the
benefits to system function and performance to be gained by the
use of improved camera technology,
additional sensors or
distributed processing schemes. The outputs from these studies
influenced the generic system architecture design to ensure that
these technologies could be implemented in to a future systems
while maintaining a scalable architecture.
The implementation of the system architecture
required both image analysis and
threat assessment algorithms to be developed. The key goal
of the image analysis algorithms was to develop the capability
to robustly detect, segment, track and classify
moving objects within the scene. This was achieved
by using a multi-view approach which has reduced system false
alarms, and produced clean detections.In addition, both track
closeness and recall are improved, a quality which benefitted the
performance of the threat analysis
algorithm. Further tests to improve the image analysis algorithm
performance and robustness are on going with specific interest
in transferring the current software implementation to graphical
processing units to offer a considerable speed increase.
The threat assessment algorithms were developed
to classify potentially critical situations, given positional and
classification data about the objects and people within the
sensed environment. The experimental results achieved demonstrated
that the inclusion of reasoning about the intentions of individuals
within a scene and the interactions between these individuals
leads to greatly improved performance over the state of the art
in the detection of the threat of abandoned baggage. In particular,
the performance of the developed SUBITO system exceeds that
achieved in the previous ISCAPS study.
The project culminated in a
final demonstration of an integrated system operating against pre
recorded scenarios, as defined during the system requirements
phase, designed to show capability against the top level
objectives mentioned above. A parallel workshop allowed discussion
of the project results and future prospects in several areas of
the implemented technology solutions.
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