Protection of public spaces and critical infrastructures based on new sensor technologies

Today, safeguarding public spaces and critical infrastructures is of paramount importance. Recognising potentially dangerous activities and events requires more than just video surveillance: including specific sounds can substantially contribute to effective scene analysis, and fusing data from radar, ultrasound and radiation detectors , as well as including static and dynamic context information , facilitates comprehensive situational awareness, source localisation and automatic interpretation of the scene.

Experts from the Austrian research centre AIT Austrian Institute of Technology offer their expertise in 1D, 2D and 3D signal processing, feature extraction, data fusion, pattern analysis, event and object classification, as well as 2D and 3D situational awareness in real time.

AIT’s tools for improving situational awareness for security & surveillance operators are based on storing, retrieving and presenting all relevant sensor information and alarms in a common, map-type user interface. A prototype system with interfaces to a commercial video surveillance and archive solution (including event list and alarm location display on a map) has been developed and evaluated in cooperation with end-users and industrial partners. It is available for further applications.

• multimodal sensor system for safety-critical event detection at “hot spots”
• local situation awareness in real-time for security forces in disaster and crisis missions
• detection of various improvised explosive devices via intelligent analytical sensor systems
• surveillance of railway tracks and highways using distributed acoustic sensing