New surveillance system identifies suspicious, lost people

cameras together in one system — you could follow a person’s trajectory seamlessly,” Davis said. His team is now working on the next step in the research: determining who should be followed.

The system will not rely on traditional profiling methods, he said. A person’s race or sex or general appearance will not matter. What will matter is where the person goes, and what they do. “If you’re doing something strange, we want to be able to detect that, and figure out what’s going on,” he said.

To determine first what constitutes normal behavior, they plan to follow the paths of many people who walk through a particular scene over a long period of time. A line tracing each person’s trajectory will be saved to a database.

“You can imagine that over a few months, you’re going to start to pick up where people tend to go at certain times of day — trends,” he said. People who stop in an unusual spot or leave behind an object like a package or book bag might be considered suspicious by law enforcement.

Davis has always wanted to see if this technology could find lost or confused people. He suspects that it can, since he can easily pick out lost people himself, while he watches video footage from the experimental camera system that surrounds his building at Ohio State. It never fails — during the first week of fall quarter, as most students hurry directly to class, some will circle the space between buildings. They’ll stop, maybe look around, and turn back and forth a lot. “Humans can pick out a lost person really well,” he said. “I believe you could build an algorithm that would also be able to do it.”

He is now looking into the possibility of deploying a large test system around the state of Ohio using their research. Law enforcement could link video cameras around the major cities, map video panoramas to publicly available aerial maps (such as those maintained by the Ohio Geographically Referenced Information Program), and use their software to provide a higher level of “location awareness” for surveillance.

Three Ohio State students are currently working on this project. Doctoral student Karthik Sankaranarayanan is funded by the National Science Foundation. And two undergraduate students — Matthew Nedrich and Karl Salva — are funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory.