Issues in video analytics and surveillance systems: Research/prototyping vs. applications/user requirements

The next generation video surveillance system will be a networked, intelligent, multi-camera co-operative system with integrated situation awareness of dynamic and complex scenes, be it a wide area like an urban centre or indoor complex like a shopping mall. The core of such a system is the increasingly intelligent and robust video analytics that are capable of analysing the videos from low-level image appearance and feature extraction to mid-level object / event detection to high-level reasoning and scene understanding. While great strides have been made in researching the issues underlying the above capabilities by academia and industry labs over the last decade, the race is now on the applications of these in integrated systems, providing automated solutions for realistic surveillance problems. This panel discussion paper attempts to outline some of the issues arising from such a transformation, the way forward towards meeting end users' needs, and the aspects of on-going industry R&D activities. Questions are raised as to how to bridge the gap between the video analytics research and system applications and solutions in the marketplace.