Research and Development in the Security and Environment department
This year, the Security and Environment department at PSI successfully bid to participate in a project that forms part of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7).
The project—"Intelligent Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment (INDECT)"—runs until the end of 2013 and is being conducted under the guidance of the renowned University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland.
Project Target
The fact that "Security" has been included as a main topic for the first time in FP7 illustrates the increased importance of research into security in recent years.
The EU security research programme is intended to promote the development of technologies and to form a scientific basis for protecting European society and its citizens from threats such as terrorism, organised crime, natural disasters and industrial accidents in the future. For the "Intelligent surveillance and border security" mission under the topic of "Security" in the Cooperation" programme, the project consortium consisting of 18 partners from 10 countries has set itself the goal of developing a platform to support monitoring of public infrastructures using the latest audio and video technologies. The project will look at registration processes and the exchange of operational data, gathering multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information, automatic identification of threats and detecting suspicious behaviour or violence.
One outcome of the INDECT project will be a test installation of the control and monitoring options at various locations within a test area, e.g. a university, and a demonstration of a prototype system with 15 nodes (weatherproof embedded computers with cameras, microphones and other sensors if necessary, e.g.biometric sensors, mobile phone identification, transfer scanners, monitoring devices, GPS, micro-transmitters and RFID tags). A decentralized computer network will support the collection, storage and exchange of information.
Platform
PSI Transcom will implement its stateof-the-art PSI Platform ("Data Hub"), which will be able to cope with the demands of a monitoring and crisis control centre. New types of services and applications for video and audio analysis to be showcased on this platform will be supplied by the project partners over the next few years. The high-availability and openly scalable PSI Platform offers every functionality for audio and video processing, measure controlling, resource management, and data archiving, ensures simple integration of applications, and supports mobile communication between the nodes. The platform will in future be offered to all interested parties in the field of infrastructure management.
