ACE Surveillance

 NRC-CNRC | IIT-ITI | Computational Video Group | Video Recognition Systems
Introduction | Demonstrations | Download | Feedback | My ACE

Demonstrations:
chez NRC Commissioners | video recognition results | video summarization examples

For detailed one-page summary poster of ACE Surveillance with it's main features and applications
click here

(If at any point you are asked for login and password, use "guest" and "ace-demo")

As a pilot project with the mandate to enhance the security within the NRC premises, NRC has installed ACE Surveillance technology with several of its surveillance cameras.

The ACE Surveillance software provides NRC commissioners a complete knowledge of all activities happening at  the monitored premises. Either at the desk or away from it a commissioner is able - within minutes - to get a complete description of the passed events and to retrieve the best possible capture of the event or person of a particular interest.

Technical details:  Installed: January 11, 2007

Features:

• Runs non-stop 24/7 on a existing equipment: 
  • Two ADT- installed analog RCA surveillance cameras that monitor the entries to the building 
  • Commissioner's desk-top computer (1GHz Processor, 1 Gb RAM, extra 1Gb of hard-drive - for optional local copy of CES-es)  

• An alarm sound is produced when someone new arrives.
• The last captured snapshot  of the person/object is shown, time-stamped - to ensure the officer that nothing happened since then and now
• Real-time back-rewind - to enable the officer who was a way from the desk to see what happened while he was away.
• Remote CES (Critical Evidence Snapshots) summarization and browsing using the ACE-Browser - accessible remotely by any commissioner with the password and login information.

• Connecting to ACE is easy: It takes off-the-shelf (50$) analog-to-USB converters and the ACE.exe program downloaded from ace.vrs.iit.nrc.ca.
  Operating ACE.exe (ACE-client) is just as easy. The program does everything itself. The officer just listens (to alarm sounds) and browses the detected events.

Premises
There are many premises that are important to monitor. Most of all, this includes entrances/exits to/from the building where no human personnel present and where an intruder or thief can pass-by unnoticed. Two of such entrance spaces in one of the NRC buildings are shown here.	In order to tighten the security in such places, NRC has purchased (from ADT security) and installed several surveillance cameras (in December 2006)
Normal Monitoring (without ACE): Every surveillance camera comes with a monitor, at which a dedicated human personnel has to look  at all times in order to aware of everything happening in the observed premises.	But what happens, when the officer has to leave the desk or is not looking at the monitor ? Will intruders pass unnoticed?  - NO, if you have ACE installed on your computer!
Monitoring with ACE: In real-time mode - Watch closely when alarm sounds.	In archival mode - Zoom on a day, on hour, then point and click

Examples: 

• On main entry: on a working day (many people pass by)
• On main entry: on a week-end day (not many people pass by and they should be known)  
• On delivery entry: a working day (many people pass by)  
• On delivery entry: on a weekend. Any passer-by is a suspect

Animated Gif: 
Video recognition (detection and tracking) quality vs. quality of video images, at different times of the day. 

• aces06-08-04-17.00-24.00-fast-ani.gif (2.5Mb - 7 hours)
• aces-3rd-am-ani.gif (16Mb - 24 hours)

Output of the ACE: The entire activity captured by the surveillance system over several hours (from the office window) is summarized into 2 minutes (600Kb) of annotated video comprised of Critical Evidence Snapshots (CES).

Older demos (January - May 2006):

These are the results from several real-life monitoring tasks as obtained by the recognition module of the CES client. Note the quality of the video image for different cameras and lighting conditions.  

(Timestamp is shown at top right of the video image. Detected objects/actions are highlighted with coloured boxes. Blue box - the center of computed foreground. Red box - motion center. Green box - enclosing around the object)

 1. Monitoring the premises in front of an office: 

2. Monitoring the premises in front of a house: 

3. Three-cam monitoring around a house: 

4. Example of automated surveillance annotation:   

 www.perceptual-vision.com (http://ace.vrs.iit.nrc.ca)
Last updated: 2006-XII-05
Copyright (R), IIT-ITI, NRC-CNRC
 Project Leader: Dmitry Gorodnichy