Publications by Simone Calderara

Dangerous situations arise in everyday life and many efforts have been lavished to exploit technology to increase the level of safety in urban areas. Video analysis is absolutely one of the most important and emerging technology for security purposes. Automatic video surveillance systems commonly analyze the scene searching for moving objects. Well known techniques exist to cope with this problem that is commonly referred as change detection". Every time a dierence against a reference model is sensed, it should be analyzed to allow the system to discriminateamong a usual situation or a possible threat. When the sensor is a camera, motion is the key element to detect changes and moving objects must be correctly classied according to their nature. In this context we can distinguish among two dierent kinds of threat that can lead to dangerous situations in a video-surveilled environment. The first one is due to environmental changes such as rain, fog or smoke present in the scene. This kind of phenomena are sensed by the camera as moving pixelsand, subsequently as moving objects in the scene. This kind of threats shares some common characteristics such as texture, shape and color information and can be detected observing the features' evolution in time. The second situation arises whenpeople are directly responsible of the dangerous situation. In this case a subject is acting in an unusual way leading to an abnormal situation. From the sensor's point of view, moving pixels are still observed, but specic features and time-dependent statistical models should be adopted to learn and then correctly detect unusual and dangerous behaviors. With these premises, this chapter will present two different case studies. The rst one describes the detection of environmental changes in theobserved scene and details the problem of reliably detecting smoke in outdoor environments using both motion information and global image features, such as color information and texture energy computed by the means of the Wavelet transform.The second refers to the problem of detecting suspicious or abnormal people behaviors by means of people trajectory analysis in a multiple cameras video-surveillance scenario. Specically, a technique to infer and learn the concept of normality is proposed jointly with a suitable statistical tool to model and robustly compare people trajectories.

People social interaction analysis is a complex and interesting problem that can be faced from several points of view depending on the application context. In videosurveillance contexts many indicators of people habits and relations exist and, among these, people trajectories analysis can reveal many aspects of the way people behave in social environments. We propose a statistical framework for trajectories mining that analyzes, in an integrated solution, several aspects of the trajectories such as location, shape and speed properties. Three different models are proposed to deal with non-idealities of the selected features in conjunction with a robust inexact- matching similarity measure for comparing sequences with different lengths. Experimental results in a real scenario demonstrates the efficacy of the framework in clustering people trajectories with the purpose of analyze frequent behaviors in complex environments.

This paper proposes a real-time system capable to extract andmodel object trajectories from a multi-camera setup with theaim of identifying abnormal paths. The trajectories are modeledas a sequence of positional distributions (2D Gaussians)and clustered in the training phase by exploiting an innovativedistance measure based on a global alignment techniqueand Bhattacharyya distance between Gaussians. An on-lineclassification procedure is proposed in order to on-the-fly classifynew trajectories into either “normal” or “abnormal” (in thesense of rarely seen before, thus unusual and potentially interesting).Experiments on a real scenario will be presented.

This paper proposes a system for people trajectory shape analysis by exploiting a statistical approach which accounts for sequences of both directional (the directions of the trajectory) and linear (the speeds) data. A semi-directional distribution (AWLG - Approximated Wrapped and Linear Gaussian) is used with a mixture to find main directions and speeds. A variational version of the mutual information criterion is proposed to prove the statistical dependency of the data. Then, in order to compare data sequences, we define an inexact method with a Kullback-Leibler-based distance measure and employ a global alignment technique is to handle sequences of different lengths and with local shifts or deformations. A comprehensive analysis of variable dependency and parameter estimation techniques are reported and evaluated on both synthetic and real data sets.

This chapter will address most of the aspects of modern video surveillance with the reference to the research activity conducted at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, within the scopes of the national FREE SURF (FREE SUrveillance in a pRivacy-respectFul way) and NATO-funded BE SAFE (Behavioral lEarning in Surveilled Areas with Feature Extraction) projects. Moving object detection and tracking from a single camera, multi-camera consistent labeling and trajectory shape analysis for path classification will be the main topics of this chapter.

This paper reports an application of trajectory analysis in which forensics and video surveillance techniques are jointly employed for providing a new tool of multimedia forensics. Advanced video surveillance techniques are used to extract from a multi-camera system the trajectories of the moving people which are then modelled by either their positions (projected on the ground plane) or their directions of movement. Both these two representations can be very suitable for querying large video repositories, by searching for similar trajectories in terms of either sequences of positions or trajectory shape (encoded as sequence of angles, where positions do not care). Preliminary examples of the possible use of this approach are shown.

In this paper we present a system for automatic segmentation, annotation and image retrieval based on content, focused on illuminated manuscripts and in particular the Borso D'Este Holy Bible. To enhance the interaction possibilities with this work, full of decorations and illustrations, we exploit some well known document analysis techniques in addition to some new approaches, in order to achieve good segmentation of pages into meaningful visual objects with the relative annotation. We wanted to extend the standard keyword-based retrieval approach in a commentary with a modern visual-based retrieval by appearance similarity: an entire software user interface for exploration and visual search of illuminated manuscripts.

This paper presents a method for recognizing human actions in a multi-camera setup. The proposed method automatically extracts significant points on the human body, without the need of artificial markers. A sophisticated appearance-based tracking able to cope with occlusions is exploited to extract a probability map for each moving object. A segmentation technique based on mixture of Gaussians is then employed to extract and track significant points on this map, corresponding to significant regions on the human silhouette. The point tracking produces a set of 3D trajectories that are compared with other trajectories by means of global alignment and dynamic programming techniques. Preliminary experiments showed the potentiality of the proposed approach.

Recognizing different actions with a unique approach can be a difficult task. This paper proposes a novel holistic representation of actions that we called "action signature". This 1D trajectory is obtained by parsing the 2D image containing the orientations of the gradient calculated on the motion feature map called motion-history image. In this way, the trajectory is a sketch representation of how the object motion varies in time. A robust statistical framework based on mixtures of von Mises distributions and dynamic programming for sequence alignment are used to compare and classify actions/trajectories. The experimental results show a rather high accuracy in distinguishing quite complicated actions, such as drinking, jumping, or abandoning an object.