Intelligent CCTV via Planetary Sensor Network

CCTV (Closed circuit TV) systems cover cities, public transport, and motorways, and the coverage is quite haphazard. It was public demand for security in public places that led to this pervasiveness. Moreover, the adoption of centralised digital video databases, largely to reduce management and monitoring costs, has also resulted in an extraordinary co-ordination of the CCTV resources. It is therefore natural to consider the power and usefulness of a distributed CCTV system, which could be extended not only to cover a city, but also to include virtually all video and still cameras on the planet. Such a system should not only include public CCTV systems in rail stations and city streets, but should also have the potential to include private CCTV systems in shopping malls and office buildings. With the advent of third generation (3G) wireless technology, there is no reason, in principle, that we could not include security cameras feeds from moving public spaces such as taxis, buses, and trains. There should also be the possibility of including the largest and cheapest potential source of image and video feeds which are those available from private mobile phone handsets with cameras. Many newer 3G handsets have both location service (GPS) and video capability, so the location of a phone could be determined and the video and image stream could be integrated into the views provided by the rest of the fixed sensor network. Another reason to investigate the ad-hoc integration of video and images from the mobile phone network into a planetary sensor network comes from a current project of the authors to use mobile smart phones as a low-cost secure medical triage system in the event of natural disasters. In 2005, a phone-based medical triage system being developed jointly by a commercial partner and the University of Queensland was used by medical officers in major natural disaster areas (ABC News 2005) in the aftermath of 1) the tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 2) Hurricane Katrina in the USA, and 3) the earthquake in Kashmir, Pakistan. During these trials the need for the delivery of person location services based on robust face recognition through the mobile phone network became apparent. For example such a service could have proved invaluable to quickly reunite families and help determine the identities of missing persons. In major natural disasters, millions of people may be displaced and housed in temporary shelters, as was indeed the case after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. In such extreme disasters is extremely difficult to rapidly determine who has survived and where they are physically located.