An Unattended System for Monitoring Human Combatant

Unattended surveillance of human combatants in urban environments is an important and challenging task in law enforcement and peace keeping missions. Traditional approaches, based either on temporal difference or pattern recognition using still frames, are inadequate. As a technology transfer effort based on prior research results of leading scientists, ImageCorp proposes in this Phase I effort to design a site model supported, PC-based surveillance system for automatic detection, tracking and monitoring of human combatants in urban environments. Using a site model, information from multiple sensors and platforms, as well as prior knowledge such as locations of sensitive areas and typical combatant activities can be employed in image exploitation. Further, the history of moving targets can be effectively represented, enabling the tracking of targets even under concealment or cessation of motion. The proposed system will fuse information collected from distributed acoustic sensors, as well as wide angle and zoom infrared and visual cameras. Solutions to issues such as 2-D site model construction, sensor stabilization and image mosaicking, moving object detection, human recognition, tracking, action understanding, and data fusion are proposed and will be investigated during the proposed Phase I effort.