This paper proposes a novel method to detect fire and/or flames in real-time by processing the video data generated by an ordinary camera monitoring a scene. In addition to ordinary motion and color clues, flame and fire flicker is detected by analyzing the video in the wavelet domain. Quasi-periodic behavior in flame boundaries is detected by performing temporal wavelet transform. Color variations in flame regions are detected by computing the spatial wavelet transform of moving fire-colored regions. Another clue used in the fire detection algorithm is the irregularity of the boundary of the fire-colored region. All of the above clues are combined to reach a final decision. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very successful in detecting fire and/or flames. In addition, it drastically reduces the false alarms issued to ordinary fire-colored moving objects as compared to the methods using only motion and color clues. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

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This paper proposes a novel method to detect flames in video by processing the data generated by an ordinary camera monitoring a scene. In addition to ordinary motion and color clues, flame flicker process is also detected by using a hidden Markov model. Markov models representing the flame and flame colored ordinary moving objects are used to distinguish flame flicker process from motion of flame colored moving objects. Spatial color variations in flame are also evaluated by the same Markov models, as well. These clues are combined to reach a final decision. False alarms due to ordinary motion of flame colored moving objects are greatly reduced when compared to the existing video based fire detection systems.

Abstract. In this paper we present an instance based machine learning algorithm and system for real-time object classification and human action recognition which can help to build intelligent surveillance systems. The proposed method makes use of object silhouettes to classify objects and actions of humans present in a scene monitored by a stationary camera. An adaptive background subtracttion model is used for object segmentation. Template matching based supervised learning method is adopted to classify objects into classes like human, human group and vehicle; and human actions into predefined classes like walking, boxing and kicking by making use of object silhouettes.

A novel method to detect flames in infrared (IR) video is proposed. Image regions containing flames appear as bright regions in IR video. In addition to ordinary motion and brightness clues, the flame flicker process is also detected by using a hidden Markov model (HMM) describing the temporal behavior. IR image frames are also analyzed spatially. Boundaries of flames are represented in wavelet domain and the high frequency nature of the boundaries of fire regions is also used as a clue to model the flame flicker. All of the temporal and spatial clues extracted from the IR video are combined to reach a final decision. False alarms due to ordinary bright moving objects are greatly reduced because of the HMM-based flicker modeling and wavelet domain boundary modeling. © 2007 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers

Automatic detection of a falling person in video is an important problem with applications in security and safety areas including supportive home environments and CCTV surveillance systems. Human motion in video is modeled using Hidden Markov Models (HMM) in this paper. In addition, the audio track of the video is also used to distinguish a person simply sitting on a floor from a person stumbling and falling. Most video recording systems have the capability of recording audio as well and the impact sound of a falling person is also available as an additional clue. Audio channel data based decision is also reached using HMMs and fused with results of HMMs modeling the video data to reach a final decision.

Dynamic textures are common in natural scenes. Examples of dynamic textures in video include fire, smoke, clouds, trees in the wind, sky, sea and ocean waves etc. In this showcase, (i) we develop real-time dynamic texture detection methods in video and (ii) present solutions to video object classification based on motion information. Copyright 2007 ACM

It is now possible to install cameras monitoring sensitive areas but it may not be possible to assign a security guard to each camera or a set of cameras. In addition, security guards may get tired and watch the monitor in a blank manner without noticing important events taking place in front of their eyes. Current CCTV surveillance systems are mostly based on video and recently intelligent video analysis systems capable of detecting humans and cars were developed for surveillance applications. Such systems mostly use Hidden Markov Models (HMM) or Support Vector Machines (SVM) to reach decisions. They detect important events but they also produce false alarms. It is possible to take advantage of other low cost sensors including audio to reduce the number of false alarms. Most video recording systems have the capability of recording audio as well. Analysis of audio for intelligent information extraction is a relatively new area. Automatic detection of broken glass sounds, car crash sounds, screams, increasing sound level at the background are indicators of important events. By combining the information coming from the audio channel with the information from the video channels, reliable surveillance systems can be built. In this chapter, current state of the art is reviewed and an intelligent surveillance system analyzing both audio and video channels is described. Multimodal Methods for SurveillanceMultimodal methods have been successfully utilized in the literature to improve the accuracy of automatic speech recognition, human activity recognition and tracking systems [355, 595]. Multimodal surveillance techniques are discussed in a recent edited book by Zhu and Huang [595]. In [597], signals from an array of microphones and a video camera installed in a room are analyzed using a Bayesian based approach for human tracking. A speech recognition system comprising of a visual as well as a audio processing unit is proposed in [147]. A recent patent proposes a coupled hidden Markov model based method for audiovisual speech recognition [361].