Analyzing video produced by a stationary surveillance camera

Today surveillance systems are everywhere. Human observers watching live videos of specific areas are not efficient due to the likely loss of attention. On the other side, unattended surveillance systems require that people analyze hours of recordings when they have to search for some specific events, e.g. identify people responsible of violence, theft or other offences. In many cases a specific search in the video has to be accomplished in the shortest amount of time. This paper presents MotionFinder, a tool that performs video analysis by computing an interactive summarization of the movements in a scene. Once the summarization process is complete, the tool responds in real time to inquires. For example, human investigators may search for specific areas in the video that show high levels of activity or where they know that something occurred (e.g.: property damaged or stolen). The tool responds by showing only the scenes in which some activity occurred for that specific area of the video. Video summarization, video analysis, visual analytics, stationary surveillance cameras