Security-relevant areas and buildings must be permanently monitored. This concerns airports, banks, industrial plants as well as power stations. The digital video monitoring and image processing systems developed by the Video and Safety Technology business unit guarantee both an immediate alarm release in case of a real emergency and also the reconstruction of criminal actions. Up to one thousand cameras can be combined in a network for monitoring of large-scale installations. Relevant video images are stored on hard disk drives with archive capacities of several terabytes. The system includes fast, alarm-controlled video multiplexers for asynchronous cameras, live monitoring and motion detection from the video image. The frames are transferred with the highest compression rate (MPEG-4) either via advanced network technology (GigaBit, FastEthernet) in real time or stored locally via a PCI interface card on a recorder PC.

For improved safety of road traffic and optimum utilisation of the road network, accidents and traffic jams must be recognised as promptly as possible. Systems for automatic traffic surveillance are becoming increasingly important. Different requirements are to be fulfilled depending upon the area of operation. In tunnel equipment the images are invariably sent to the tunnel control room and evaluated there. In the urban environment, intelligent video sensors with local image evaluation are required. In addition, the assigned components must be economical and at the same time of an increasingly higher data transmission rate and quality. Networked, embedded real time systems can fulfil these requirements. With its SmartCam, the business unit has realised the prototype of a smart camera with embedded technology in 2003. The camera recognises unusual traffic conditions as a stand-alone unit.

"Science in our heads is not yet the product of tomorrow, but building a gateway to new technology is our strength," clarifies Helmut Schwabach (Business Development) the core competence of Seibersdorf Video and Safety Technology. The business unit also counts on international partnerships. With the development of networked, embedded real time systems an "Authorized Developer Agreement" has been signed with the US chip manufacturer NetSilicon, which has a prominent role in the SoC market (system on chip) for networked systems, a "Third party contract" with Texas Instruments as well as a marketing support agreement with Ateme, one of the two prominent software producers for MPEG-4 compression on digital signal processors (DSPs). On European level Video and Safety Technology participates in the European Union projects AVITRACK (video monitoring at airports) and MUSCLE (content analysis of multimedia data) in the Sixth Framework Program.

Challenges for research and development:

• compressed data transfer and archiving (MPEG-4, H.264)
• reliable automatic scene interpretation via image processing
• implementation as an embedded system

The business unit co-operates with university institutes as well as with Advanced Computer Vision GmbH - ACV.