Introduction to FreeSURF - (Italian Version)

Free surf is meant to be a paradigm for the new generation of video surveillance systems, free from controls by human operators, and completely respectful of the privacy. The technological support will be given by emerging solutions of computer engineering both in system architectures for real-time video processing and in innovative techniques of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. The majority of the commercial systems only focus on video acquisition and on their visualization in control rooms. The most innovative systems already exploit simple computer vision techniques for motion detection, but with many structural and technological constraints, such as the installation of fixed cameras only, with manual calibration, very simple target models, and, in particular, the lack of inferential capabilities and scene understanding that makes necessary the constant presence of human operators. The “free surveillance” systems aim at overcome these technological constraints, by creating new automatic systems also socially acceptable, since they will be perfectly coherent with the current laws on privacy.

This project aims at developing innovative solutions for detecting people in an automatic way by processing videos in real-time. Original and robust techniques will be applied to installations free from structural constraints, and, in particular, to multicamera distributed systems (with fixed, PTZ and mobile cameras) coordinated with sensors networks. The visual data about people will be used to recognize situations modelled with statistical and machine learning techniques in order to generate alarms in the case of dangerous situations. Information retrieval techniques based on visual content will be employed to detect occurrences of the same people or similar situations in videos acquired in different time or different cameras. This will provide effective tools for the support to investigations and posterity analysis. Face detection techniques will be used to extract and remove biometric data from the videos in real time. By doing this, these systems could be also used to transmit on the web information on the environment without transmitting data protected by privacy laws. They could be installed in public places in a socially-acceptable way, without the “Big Brother” syndrome.

These extermely-innovative proposals will not lead only on theoretical research activity, but also to the concrete development of working prototypes in the two years of the project. This is guaranteed by the composition of the group: the three RUs are involved in computer vision and pattern recognition researches since many years, and they are leading groups in the national and international context, and have active collaborations with the most important international research centres. The project has a strong national relevance because it will allow to develop also in Italy, in a coordinated and synergic way, research on computer vision, research that must be done with a sufficient number of people involved to maintain international excellence. Additionally, the created consortium also includes extra-university groups that work on this field, such as the ITC-iRST of Trento, that, even if not funded, are interested in collaborating to the project and, even more important, the project has the support and the interest of many companies and public entities that want to exploit directly the results of such activity. The project has strong implications of innovation and social impact, and can provide an immediate technological transfer to the companies that already collaborate with the RUs of the project or that have awaked their interest for new solutions to automatic video surveillance.