Visual Sensor Technology for Advanced Surveillance Systems: Historical View, Technological Aspects and Research Activities in Italy

• Main Authors: Lauro Snidaro, Claudio Piciarelli, Gian Luca Foresti, Christian Micheloni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2009-03-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Advanced visual surveillance; visual sensor networks; active vision; object detection; tracking; human behaviour understanding
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/9/4/2252/

The paper is a survey of the main technological aspects of advanced visual-based surveillance systems. A brief historical view of such systems from the origins to nowadays is given together with a short description of the main research projects in Italy on surveillance applications in the last twenty years. The paper then describes the main characteristics of an advanced visual sensor network that (a) directly processes locally acquired digital data, (b) automatically modifies intrinsic (focus, iris) and extrinsic (pan, tilt, zoom) parameters to increase the quality of acquired data and (c) automatically selects the best subset of sensors in order to monitor a given moving object in the observed environment.