Semantic Video Content Analysis

In recent years, there has been significant interest in the area of automatically recognizing activities occurring in a camera’s field of view and detecting abnormalities. The practical applications of such a system could include airport tarmac monitoring, or monitoring of activities in secure installations, to name a few. The difficulty of the problem is compounded by several factors: detection of primitive actions in spite of changes in illumination, occlusions and noise; complexmultiagent interaction;mapping of higher-level activities to lower-level primitive actions; variations in which the same semantic activity can be performed. In this chapter, we develop a theory of semantic activity analysis that addresses each of these issues in an integrated manner. Specifically, we discuss ontological representations of knowledge of a domain, integration of domain knowledge and statistical models for achieving semantic mappings, definition of logical languages to describe activities, and design of frameworks which integrate all the above aspects in a coherent way, thus laying the foundations of effective Semantic Video Content Analysis systems.