Smart video surveillance gets smarter.

• Author: Pappalardo, Joe
• Position: Homeland Defense Briefs

The U.S. government is showing a great deal of interest in the applications of state-of-the-art video surveillance tools and put some applications to the test in November. An evaluation was conducted for several weeks that probed their use in counter-terrorism scenarios.

The highest scoring system, Alert Vision by Northrop Grumman, processes live video streams and highlights any behavior that meets its programmed criteria for suspicious activity. For example, a strolling figure would be framed with a green square, but that square would turn red if the person dropped a case and walked away from it. These triggers are programmable. The system would highlight the case and the figure, alerting the guard watching the video bank.

Also included in Grumman's system is a license plate recognition scanner that can read and identify security-flagged vehicle plates in seconds.

Each competing technology in the test, which was hosted by the Energy Department and Air Force national assessment group, was installed in a site and tested for two weeks. Company officials trained government operators to respond to a variety of environmental and threat conditions.

The future of such surveillance systems is on display at Northrop Grumman's center for smart security solutions in Reston, Va. Seated in movie-house chairs, visitors can gaze on a large-screen demonstration of next-generation perimeter security systems. Intruders are detected with sensors, including video cameras trained on any human-like objects sneaking onto restricted grounds. The system then tracks the...