Aspects Of Surveillance

Introduction
Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting them . An automated surveillance system is a substitution for direct human observation. Artificial intelligence algorithms are commonly used to detect what is being observed. There are several aspects of surveillance, some of which include the following:
i. Computer and Network surveillance: Monitoring of data stored on one’s computer, computer activity or data being transferred over networks such as the Internet. This is usually done by governments, corporations, criminal organizations or. The data gathered is too much for a human investigator to go through

Biometric surveillance: Any technology that measures and analyzes human physical and/or behavioral characteristics for authentication, identification, or screening purposes. Some examples of physical characteristics include fingerprints, DNA, and facial patterns. iv. RFID and geolocation devices: RFID tagging is the use of very small electronic devices called ‘RFID tags’. These tags are connected to a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves.
v. Disease surveillance: Monitoring the spread of a disease in order to establish patterns of progression. Disease surveillance is used to observe, predict and minimize the harm caused by outbreak, epidemic, and pandemic situations. vi. CCTV (Closed-circuit television): Use of video cameras to observe an area.
In this document we will mainly focus on Video Surveillance. CCTV cameras are used to observe an area. The video is then used to identify a specific scene such as human activities, vehicular traffic and further more. Surveillance systems are mostly important in the field of security. They are used in areas that require monitoring such as shops, banks and airports. They help extract significant information such as human identification, recognition of specific human activities, object classification, traffic surveillance and scene identification. Recently the use of security surveillance systems is increasing due to the increase of terrors and crimes. CCTV cameras for surveillance

They are used for security and operations on the streets, airports and train stations. They are used in retail stores to prevent loss and to understand shopper behaviour. Surveillance systems are also used in casinos and museums. They are used in casinos to detect, record and index cheating or suspicious behaviour, find valued customers and banned or ‘watchlist’ customers. Studies show that manual surveillance is impractical due to lack of attention span, increasing number of channels and increasing ‘situation awareness’ needs. Since automated surveillance systems have computers watch the videos, it is scalable i.e. more servers and licences can be bought to increase the number of channels. It is also cheaper than having people watch the videos. Indexing and retrieval is made easier by the use of automated video surveillance systems. Another benefit of automated surveillance systems is that it provides real-time