By Lindsay Lewis
Public safety video systems help the City of Houston respond to emergency events and monitor critical infrastructure, such as the Port of Houston, the Texas Medical Center, and our stadiums, airports and roadways. However, the manual monitoring of large number of video feeds across the city can be challenging and inefficient.
In response, UH computer scientist Shishir Shah and his team are designing software solutions with image processing capabilities that facilitate video-based monitoring and improve situational awareness. Shah’s algorithms and software will automate video analyses and generate alerts to bring to attention events of interest occurring in the city.
The algorithms and software can understand human and object motion, track and predict human behavior, and allow video system operators and first responders to define events of interest. Working in partnership with the Houston Public Safety Video System, Shah aims to improve understanding of video data quality for automated analyses, guide wide-area deployments of video systems, and create advanced algorithms for video analyses to facilitate public safety.
The work is evolving and expanding with lessons learned in collaboration with other cities, such as Baltimore and Cincinnati.
“We’ve long worked to provide video analytics for forensic analyses. We are now working with public safety agencies to provide real-time alerting to objects, threats and events of interest across Houston,” Shah said.
Image: Courtesy of University of Houston
