Joint video-shot and layer indexing in video-surveillance application

In this paper, a joint video-shot and layer indexing technique is presented with applications to automatic surveillance of indoor environments. A video-based surveillance system has been developed that simultaneously tracks moving objects and detects the presence of abandoned objects. Whenever an abandoned abject is detected, the system is able to determine the video-shot in which a particular object (layer) appears in the guarded environment, from the first frame in which that object enters in the scene to the frame in which the object has been left. The semantic information related on both the dangerous object and the person who left it, allows the system to perform the video-shot detection and indexing tasks. What is important in a video-shot is the information related to the dangerous object present in it. For this reason a video-shot has a two level indexing: the first one is related to the characteristics of the video-shot and the second one is related to the characteristics of a particular layer.