Chutidej Printhitipa, country manager of IBM Thailand's global technology section, said the technology, developed by IBM Research, provides the capacity to automatically monitor a scene, manage the surveillance data, perform event-based retrieval and receive real-time event alerts through standard Web-based infrastructure.

"Smart surveillance systems use automatic image-understanding techniques to extract information from the surveillance data," Chutidej said.

IBM's Release 1 of S3 includes two components - the Smart Surveillance Engine, which provides the front-end video analysis capability, and the Middleware for Large Scale Surveillance facility, which provides data management capabilities.

The technology is based around object detection in the presence of distraction motion, 2D object tracking, object classification, 3D object tracking and also multi-scale tracking.

Chutidej said: "It can do the multi-camera handoff, which is the ability to track an object across cameras; and face cataloguing, that is the capability to capture faces at large distances from the camera."

Having it based on extendable markup language (XML) technology means it can process metadata representation for an object and its motion attributes.

It is also easy to plug into and play video analytics, and can search scene events in a distributed database environment.

"As it is based on Web-service interfaces, it can support the rapid application development of customer-specific applications. It is easily customised to the meet the requirements of different applications by using an open-standards-based architecture for surveillance," said Chutidej.

In addition, users can pre-programme events and then set the system to provide real-time alarms of those events.

The system itself can search through event data and understand patterns that enable the user to add on and update new "security strategies".

"As we have just introduced our service here in Thailand, as well as in the Asia-Pacific region, we do not expect many customers at this stage although we aim to have at least two customers in Thailand this year.

"We are currently approaching them.

"Both are from the private sector and are concerned with security. They want to apply this kind of technology for marketing and business improvement as well," he said.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation