Detecting abnormal activities from multi-sensor surveillance systems

The main purpose of a surveillance system is to monitor valuable assets, such as office buildings and homes, and report any occurring security incidents. Sensor malfunctions or abnormal usages of the system are possible scenarios in a real life and a surveillance system with hundreds of sensors is creating a vast amount of data which is impossible to handle manually. This renders the fixing of these potential faults slow and expensive. This paper proposes a system which can analyse data received from a surveillance system. The proposed system will report abnormal activities, such as malfunctioning or dead sensors, abnormal usage, and abnormal events created by the surveillance system. The experimental evaluation is performed by using six cases describing different types of abnormal activity. The experiments indicate that the proposed system can effectively pinpoint faulty sensors and other abnormal activities. This will ease the task of the maintenance personnel to locate and fix possible problem in the surveillance system.