Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Recently, due to the significant increase in various security threats, multimedia surveillance systems are being increasingly used at many public places to monitor/record people's activities and avoid any potential untoward incidents. Although the current-generation surveillance infrastructures have proved to be highly useful from a security perspective; there has been a major apprehension among people in regard to their privacy safeguards. Recent reports also suggests that the privacy concerns have increased. It is worth mentioning that although there has been a significant progress in the field of surveillance research, the issues related to people's privacy have often been overlooked in the past and have only begun to attract the attention of researchers very recently. Achieving the goals of security and privacy simultaneously is quite challenging as it requires a mechanism that can automatically determine in real time what to monitor/record for safety purpose and what not to monitor/record for privacy concerns. For the effective design and development of privacy-aware multimedia surveillance systems beyond today's state of the art, many interesting research questions related to privacy aware sensory data management, processing, analysis, fusion, and retrieval need to be answered. Building on the applicant's extensive expertise in multimedia surveillance, this research is aimed to investigate scientific solutions to perform effective and automated surveillance keeping the people privacy in tact.