Intelligent Surveillance and Intrusion detection for Ships (ISIS)

"The ability of the Navy to protect its forces during overseas and domestic port calls is critical for the successful completion of its missions. The USS Cole incident and more recent events call for an effective in-port surveillance system for the Navy andthe development of effective surveillance systems to protect other high-value national assets. However, this is a challenging task given the amount of port traffic and the lack of appropriate vision sensors on board Navy vessels. Commercial surveillancesystems cannot be used because of sensor placement requirements and assumptions about lighting conditions and background types that do not hold in port scenarios. We propose to develop an intelligent shipboard surveillance system. The system utilizescatadioptric vision to achieve panoramic coverage. A combination of visible-light and IR sensors enables day and night operation. The software portion of the system consists of a specialized background analysis and clutter mitigation module, a multi-objecttracking module and an intelligent agent that uses high-level knowledge and contextual information (if available from other shipboard sensors) to control system parameters. The output of the system is a set of tracks as well as an annotated video streamfor easy visualization by the watchstanders. An intelligent surveillance system that provides omni-directional scene awareness and does not require a large network of sensors would find imm