Systems issues in distributed multi-modal surveillance

To be viable commercial multi-modal surveillance systems, the systems need to be reliable, robust and must be able to work at night (maybe the most critical time). They must handle small and non-distinctive targets that are as far away as possible. Like other commercial applications, end users of the systems must be able to operate them in a proper way. In this paper, we focus on three significant inherent limitations of current surveillance systems: the effective accuracy at relevant distances, the ability to define and visualize the events on a large scale, and the usability of the system.