Monitoring of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue, especially after the recent flurry of terrorist attacks including the one on the Word Trade Center in September 2001. It is, therefore, imperative that effective multisensor surveillance systems be developed to protect the society from similar attacks in the future. The new generation of surveillance systems to be developed have a specific requirement: they must be able to automatically identify criminal and terrorist activity without sacrificing individual privacy to the extent possible. Privacy laws concerning monitoring and surveillance systems vary from country to country but, in general, they try to protect the privacy of their citizens. Monitoring and visual surveillance has numerous other applications. It can be employed to help invalids or handicapped and to monitor the activities of elderly people. It can be used to monitor large events such as sporting events, as well. Nowadays, monitoring is employ~d in several different contexts including transport applications, such as monitoring of railway stations and airports, dangerous environments like nuclear facilities or traffic flows on roads and bridges. The latest generation of surveillance systems mainly rely on hybrid analog-digital, or completely digital video communications and processing methods and take advantage of the greater of flexibility offered by video processing algorithms that are capable focusing a human operator's attention on a set of interesting situations.

For some time, all branches of the military have used a wide range of sensors to provide data for many purposes, including surveillance, reconnoitring, target detection and battle damage assessment. Many nations have also attempted to utilise these sensors for civilian applications, such as crop monitoring, agricultural disease tracking, environmental diagnostics, cartography, ocean temperature profiling, urban planning, and the characterisation of the Ozone Hole above Antarctica. The recent convergence of several important technologies has made possible new, advanced, high performance, sensor based applications relying on the near-simultaneous fusion of data from an ensemble of different types of sensors. The book examines the underlying principles of sensor operation and data fusion, the techniques and technologies that enable the process, including the operation of 'fusion engines'. Fundamental theory and the enabling technologies of data fusion are presented in a systematic and accessible manner. Applications are discussed in the areas of medicine, meteorology, BDA and targeting, transportation, cartography, the environment, agriculture, and manufacturing and process control.

There is a growing interest in the development and deployment of intelligent surveillance systems in public and private locations. This book consists of a selection of extended versions of presentations made in two symposia on intelligent distributed surveillance systems (IDSS) and brings together the latest developments in the field.

Information fusion resulting from multi-source processing, often called multisensor data fusion when sensors are the main sources of information, is a relatively young (less than 20 years) technology domain. It provides techniques and methods for: Integrating data from multiple sources and using the complementarity of this data to derive maximum information about the phenomenon being observed; Analyzing and deriving the meaning of these observations; Selecting the best course of action; and Controlling the actions. Various sensors have been designed to detect some specific phenomena, but not others. Data fusion applications can combine synergically information from many sensors, including data provided by satellites and contextual and encyclopedic knowledge, to provide enhanced ability to detect and recognize anomalies in the environment, compared with conventional means. Data fusion is an integral part of multisensor processing, but it can also be applied to fuse non-sensor information (geopolitical, intelligence, etc.) to provide decision support for a timely and effective situation and threat assessment. One special field of application for data fusion is satellite imagery, which can provide extensive information over a wide area of the electromagnetic spectrum using several types of sensors (Visible, Infra-Red (IR), Thermal IR, Radar, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR), Hyperspectral...). Satellite imagery provides the coverage rate needed to identify and monitor human activities from agricultural practices (land use, crop types identification...) to defence-related surveillance (land/sea target detection and classification). By acquiring remotely sensed imagery over earth regions that land sensors cannot access, valuable information can be gathered for the defence against terrorism. This books deals with the following research areas: Target recognition/classification and tracking; Sensor systems; Image processing; Remote sensing and remote control; Belief functions theory; and Situation assessment.

"Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Multisensor Data and Information Processing for Rapid and Robust Situation and Threat Assessment, Albena, Bulgaria, 16-27 May 2005"--T.p. verso.

PAAMS, the International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is an evolution of the International Workshop on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. PAAMS is an international yearly tribune to present, to discuss, and to disseminate the latest developments and the most important outcomes related to real-world applications. It provides a unique opportunity to bring multi-disciplinary experts, academics and practitioners together to exchange their experience in the development of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. This volume presents the papers that have been accepted for the 2009 edition. These articles capture the most innovative results and this year’s trends: Assisted Cognition, E-Commerce, Grid Computing, Human Modelling, Information Systems, Knowledge Management, Agent-Based Simulation, Software Development, Transports, Trust and Security. Each paper has been reviewed by three different reviewers, from an international committee composed of 64 members from 20 different countries. From the 92 submissions received, 35 were selected for full presentation at the conference, and 26 were accepted as posters.

Research on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems has matured during the last decade and many effective applications of this technology are now deployed. PAAMS provides an international forum to present and discuss the latest scientific developments and their effective applications, to assess the impact of the approach, and to facilitate technology transfer. PAAMS started as a local initiative, but has since grown to become THE international yearly platform to present, to discuss, and to disseminate the latest developments and the most important outcomes related to real-world applications. It provides a unique opportunity to bring multi-disciplinary experts, academics and practitioners together to exchange their experience in the development and deployment of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. PAAMS intends to bring together researchers and developers from industry and the academic world to report on the latest scientific and technical advances on the application of multi-agent systems, to discuss and debate the major issues, and to showcase the latest systems using agent based technology. It will promote a forum for discussion on how agent-based techniques, methods, and tools help system designers to accomplish the mapping between available agent technology and application needs. Other stakeholders should be rewarded with a better understanding of the potential and challenges of the agent-oriented approach. This edition of PAAMS special sessions. This symposium is organized by the Bioinformatics, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite.usal.es/http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca. The present edition will be held in Salamanca, Spain, from 28th to 30th March 2012. This edition of PAAMS special sessions. This symposium is organized by the Bioinformatics, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite.usal.es/http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca. The present edition will be held in Salamanca, Spain, from 28th to 30th March 2012.

Following from the very successful First KES Symposium on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2007), held in Wroclaw, Poland, 31 May–1 June 2007, the second event in the KES-AMSTA symposium series (KES-AMSTA 2008) was held in Incheon, Korea, March 26–28, 2008. The symposium was organized by the School of Computer and Information Engineering, Inha University, KES International and the KES Focus Group on Agent and Mul- agent Systems. The KES-AMSTA Symposium Series is a sub-series of the KES Conference Series. The aim of the symposium was to provide an international forum for scientific research into the technologies and applications of agent and multi-agent systems. Agent and multi-agent systems are related to the modern software which has long been recognized as a promising technology for constructing autonomous, complex and intelligent systems. A key development in the field of agent and multi-agent systems has been the specification of agent communication languages and formalization of ontologies. Agent communication languages are intended to provide standard declarative mechanisms for agents to communicate knowledge and make requests of each other, whereas ontologies are intended for conceptualization of the knowledge domain. The symposium attracted a very large number of scientists and practitioners who submitted their papers for nine main tracks concerning the methodology and applications of agent and multi-agent systems, a doctoral track and two special sessions.

This book will provide an overview of techniques for visual monitoring including video surveillance and human activity understanding. It will present the basic techniques of processing video from static cameras, starting with object detection and tracking. The author will introduce further video analytic modules including face detection, trajectory analysis and object classification. Examining system design and specific problems in visual surveillance, such as the use of multiple cameras and moving cameras, the author will elaborate on privacy issues focusing on approaches where automatic processing can help protect privacy.