ASEV — Automatic situation assessment for event-driven video analysis

Many complex maneuvers involving aircraft, vehicles and persons are carried out at airport aprons. Manual video surveillance used for safety and security purposes is inefficient and privacy protection must be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a system named ASEV that automatically assesses situations for airport surveillance. It combines four main components: a low-level image processing unit based on a new hardware implementation to extract features in real time, a high-level image processing unit for scene analysis, a real-time inference engine for scene understanding, and a data protection stage for log encryption. In addition, four often neglected aspects are successfully addressed: two-way communication between system and operator, power consumption, monitored people privacy and operator activity control. Extensive evaluation at a real airport shows that the proposed system improves the operator performance with sound and visual alerts based on the automatic assessment of various events.