A human (inter)face for video surveillance
The "Annotated Digital Video for Surveillance and Optimised Retrieval" (Advisor) project's system stores raw image and annotation data in an archive. Surveillance staff then retrieve selected sequences of images according to multiple criteria. For ease of use, the project has developed a graphical user interface (GUI) that emulates the controls of a video cassette recorder (VCR). The operator can select play, fast forward, rewind, step, pause, etc. to access the image sequences. The system is enabled by structuring the data so as to keep image sequences and search criteria in separate spaces. The new web language XML (eXtended Mark-up Language), the successor to HTML, is then used to exchange data between the databases and the surveillance operator's workstation. The data used for searching (camera name and location, date and time) are stored in a relational database, while the raw images are stored in separate volumes of the server's file system. General purpose XML tools also needed to be customised for this application, but the system can be adapted to video surveillance applications proposed by interested third parties.
