Video Analytics for Surveillance: Theory and Practice [From the Guest Editors]

Video analytics, loosely defined as autonomous understanding of events occurring in a scene monitored by multiple video cameras, has been rapidly evolving in the last two decades. Despite this effort, practical surveillance systems deployed today are not yet capable of autonomous analysis of complex events in the field of view of cameras. This is a serious deficiency as video feeds from millions of surveillance cameras worldwide are not analyzed in real time and thus cannot help with accident, crime or terrorism prevention, and mitigation, issues critical to the contemporary society. Today, these feeds are, at best, recorded to facilitate post-event video forensics.