Surveillance-Oriented Event Detection in Video Streams

The field of computer vision covers a large number of research topics, ranging from low-level processing aspects up to high-level image and video interpretation problems. This article gives a short introduction to security-oriented event analysis systems, whose aim is to give a semantic interpretation to video sequences in order to detect anomalous, dangerous or forbidden situations. The two main approaches to event analysis are here described, highlighting their advantages and limits. For each approach, a practical example is given, showing how events can be explicitly recognized in terms of their structure, or alternatively how they can be classified according to their degree of anomaly.