Video Event Recognition for Surveillance Applications (VERSA)

VERSA provides a general-purpose framework for defining and recognizing events in live or recorded surveillance video streams. The approach for event recognition in VERSA is using a declarative logic language to define the spatial and temporal relationships that characterize a given event or activity. Doing so requires the definition of certain fundamental spatial and temporal relationships and a high-level syntax for specifying frame templates and query parameters. Although the handling of uncertainty in the current VERSA implementation is simplistic, the language and architecture is amenable to extending using Fuzzy Logic or similar approaches. VERSA's high-level architecture is designed to work in XML-based, services- oriented environments. VERSA can be thought of as subscribing to the XML annotations streamed by a lower-level video analytics service that provides basic entity detection, labeling, and tracking. One or many VERSA Event Monitors could thus analyze video streams and provide alerts when certain events are detected.