A Distributed Surveillance System to Improve Personal Security in Public Transport

This paper presents a distributed surveillance system to improve safety and security in public transport environments such as metropolitan railways, airports etc. The system is constructed by a set of modules that provide additional intelligence to detect potentially dangerous situations and provide more timely prevention and management of events. These modules include CCTV video processing, audio detection, mobile smart cards, a range of other possible sensors and a supervisory front-end. The system design uses ideas from control engineering and distributed network communication resulting in a CORBA based architecture and XML messaging. The system components have been implemented and integrated in two major successful trials in metropolitan railway stations (London and Paris) and at Newcastle International Airport, as part of a major EU-funded project PRISMATICA (“PRo-active Integrated systems for Security Management by Technological, Institutional and Communication Assistance”).