A Distributed Surveillance System for Detection of Abandoned Objects in Unmanned Railway Environments

In this paper, a distributed video-surveillance system for the detection of dangerous situations related to the presence of abandoned objects in the waiting rooms of unattended railway stations is presented. The image sequences, acquired with a monochromatic camera placed in each guarded room, are processed by a local PC-based image-processing system, devoted to detecting the presence of abandoned objects. When an abandoned object is recognized, an alarm issue is transmitted to a remote control center, located few miles far from the guarded stations. A multimedia communication system based on direct sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) techniques aims at ensuring secure and noise-robust wireless transmission links between the guarded stations and the remote control center, where the processing results are displayed to the human operator. Results concern: 1) the performances of each local image processing system in terms of false-alarm and misdetection probabilities, and 2) ...