4 Smart cities and communities
4.2 Intelligent video (surveillance) for a safe community

With growing security concerns in daily life, improved video surveillance has become an urgent priority for both the public and private sectors. Whether in airports, banks or factories video surveillance systems are an essential tool to fight crime and provide safety. Nowadays there exist many scales of surveillance systems (from Home surveillance systems, city wide systems to national wide systems). Their intelligence varies as well. Even simple cameras have in many cases built in features such as motion detection, moving object counting, etc. If the camera does not have it built in, connecting the camera to video analytics systems does the job as well. Two of the most important aspects of smart cities are intelligent security and surveillance. With video analytics, remote and unmanned monitoring is possible. For example, there would be no need for manual monitoring, or unattended object detection, or for securing valuable assets, or for illegal parking, or for intruder detection. All this can be efficiently and automatically done by using configurable video analytics which can help in the reduction of false alarms, and leveraging real time custom alerts so that proper and timely action can be taken. This can also be applied in many other cases such as crowd monitoring, people counting, vandalism, queue management, and more. Face recognition systems can help to reduce criminal activities by helping to nab criminals faster.

These technologies can be also applied to traffic area to enhance the safety, either as assistive technology for the driver (wrong way, speed zones) or e.g. in enforcements systems using license plate recognition it could help to reduce traffic rule violations.