Vision-Based

Abstract

The protection of critical transportation assets and infrastructure is an important topic these days. Transportation assets such as bridges, overpasses, dams and tunnels are vulnerable to attacks. In addition, facilities such as chemical storage, office complexes and laboratories can become targets. Many of these facilities exist in areas of high pedestrian traffic, making them accessible to attack, while making the monitoring of the facilities difficult. In this research, we developed components of an automated, “smart video” system to track pedestrians and detect situations where people may be in peril, as well as suspicious motion or activities at or near critical transportation assets. The software tracks individual pedestrians as they pass through the field of vision of the camera, and uses vision algorithms to classify the motion and activities of each pedestrian. The tracking is accomplished through the development of a position and velocity path characteristic for each pedestrian using a...