Multimedia surveillance systems

The integration of video technology and sensor networks constitutes the fundamental infrastructure for new generations of multimedia surveillance systems, where many different media streams (audio, video, images, textual data, sensor signals) will concur to provide an automatic analysis of the controlled environment and a real-time interpretation of the scene. New solutions can be devised to enlarge the view of traditional surveillance systems by means of distributed architectures with fixed and active cameras, to enhance their view with other sensed data, to explore multi-resolution views with zooming and omnidirectional cameras. Applications regard surveillance of wide indoor and outdoor area and particularly people surveillance: in this case, multimedia surveillance systems can be enriched with biometric technology; the best views of detected persons and their extracted visual features (e.g. faces, voices, trajectories) can be exploited for people identification.VSSN05 is the third edition of the workshop, co-located at ACM Multimedia Conference, that embraces research reports on video surveillance and, since the edition of 2004, sensor networks. This paper gives a short overview of the hot topics in multimedia surveillance systems and introduces some research activities currently engaged in the world and presented at VSSN05.