Privacy Sensitive Surveillance for Assisted Living - A Smart Camera Approach

An elderly woman wanders about aimlessly in a home for assisted living. Suddenly, she collapses on the floor of a lonesome hallway. Usually it can take over two hours until a night nurse passes this spot on her next inspection round. But in this case she is already on site after two minutes, ready to help. She has received an alert message on her beeper: “Inhabitant fallen in hallway 2b”. The source: the SmartSurv distributed network of smart cameras for automated and privacy respecting video analysis. Welcome to the future of smart surveillance! Although this scenario is not yet daily practice, it shall make clear how such systems will impact the safety of the elderly without the privacy intrusion of traditional video surveillance systems. The demand for video surveillance systems is immensely increasing in various fields of security applications and beyond. Camera systems cover, e.g., airports, train stations and are nowadays also installed in trains and some aircrafts. Further examples include monitoring of power plants, shopping malls, museums, parking garages and hotels. A typical casino in Las Vegas uses over 2,000 cameras [39, 11]. Over 4 million cameras are installed in the UK. Moreover, additional applications arise that are not motivated by security but have its purpose in marketing, e.g., statistics in retail stores like measuring shelf attractiveness or getting information about the customers (gender, child/adult etc.). Traffic monitoring is another field. Areas aiming at increased individual safety independent of terrorist threats further extend the application range of such systems. One important example is the field of assisted living where we currently concentrate on. According to [24] the US population over