Advanced Video Surveillance archives search Engine for security applications

ADVISE is a research project co-funded by the FP7-Security Workprogramme of the European Commission, aimed at designing and developing a unification framework for surveillance-footage archive systems. The ADVISE project developed tools to ease the work of law enforcement authorities in their fight against crime and terrorism, through negotiation of all relevant legal, ethical and privacy constraints, and through location-based video archive selection and efficient evidence mining of multiple, heterogeneous video archives. In a context where surveillance systems are continuously growing in scale, heterogeneity and capabilities, two major obstacles had to be overcome.

On one hand, the variety of technical components of surveillance systems, producing video repositories with different compression formats, indexing systems, data storage formats sources, must be addressed. On the other hand, the legal, ethical and privacy rules that govern surveillance and the produced content had to be considered. The ADVISE system offered semantically enriched, event based video analysis, enabling efficient search capabilities of video archives and sophisticated result visualization. In parallel, ADVISE enforced legal, ethical and privacy constraints that apply to the exchange and processing of surveillance data.

The final system was presented to relevant authorities and received positive feedback from the attendees. Multiple authorities expressed their interest to test the system on their premises. Based on this success, the development of the ADVISE system is continued in the framework of the EU-funded Fast Track to Innovation (FTI) project SURVANT, aiming to reach the market as a product.