Abstract: The integration of cognitive capabilities in computer vision systems requires both to enable high semantic expressiveness and to deal with high computational costs as large amounts of data are involved in the analysis. This contribution describes a cognitive vision system conceived to automatically provide high-level interpretations of complex real-time situations in outdoor and indoor scenarios, and to eventually maintain communication with casual end users in multiple languages. The main contributions are: (i) the design of an integrative multilevel architecture for cognitive surveillance purposes; (ii) the proposal of a coherent taxonomy of knowledge to guide the process of interpretation, which leads to the conception of a situation-based ontology; (iii) the use of situational analysis for content detection and a progressive interpretation of semantically rich scenes, by managing incomplete or uncertain knowledge, and (iv) the use of such an ontological background to enable multilingual capabilities and advanced end-user interfaces. Experimental results are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Advanced surveillance systems for behavior recognition in outdoor traffic scenes depend strongly on the particular configuration of the scenario. Scene-independent trajectory analysis techniques statistically infer semantics in locations where motion occurs, and such inferences are typically limited to abnormality. Thus, it is interesting to design contributions that automatically categorize more specific semantic regions. State-of-the-art approaches for unsupervised scene labeling exploit trajectory data to segment areas like sources, sinks, or waiting zones. Our method, in addition, incorporates scene-independent knowledge to assign more meaningful labels like crosswalks, sidewalks, or parking spaces. First, a spatiotemporal scene model is obtained from trajectory analysis. Subsequently, a so-called GI-MRF inference process reinforces spatial coherence, and incorporates taxonomy-guided smoothness constraints. Our method achieves automatic and effective labeling of conceptual regions in urban scenarios, and is robust to tracking errors. Experimental validation on 5 surveillance databases has been conducted to assess the generality and accuracy of the segmentations. The resulting scene models are used for model-based behavior analysis.