Janus - Multi Source Event Detection and Collection System for Effective Surveillance of Criminal Activity

Recent technological advances provide the opportunity to use large amounts of multimedia data from a multitude of sensors with different modalities (e.g., video, text) for the detection and characterization of criminal activity. Their integration can compensate for sensor and modality deficiencies by using data from other available sensors and modalities. However, building such an integrated system at the scale of neighborhood and cities is challenging due to the large amount of data to be considered and the need to ensure a short response time to potential criminal activity. In this paper, we present a system that enables multi-modal data collection at scale and automates the detection of events of interest for the surveillance and reconnaissance of criminal activity. The proposed system showcases novel analytical tools that fuse multimedia data streams to automatically detect and identify specific criminal events and activities. More specifically, the system detects and analyzes series of incidents (an incident is an occurrence or artifact relevant to a criminal activity extracted from a single media stream) in the spatiotemporal domain to extract events (actual instances of criminal events) while cross-referencing multimodal media streams and incidents in time and space to provide a comprehensive view to a human operator while avoiding information overload. We present several case studies that demonstrate how the proposed system can provide law enforcement personnel with forensic and real time tools to identify and track potential criminal activity. Keywords— multi-source, multi-modal event detection, law enforcement, criminal activity, surveillance, security, safety