This book provides an introductory treatment of the fundamentals of decision-making in a distributed framework. Classical detection theory assumes that complete observations are available at a central processor for decision-making. More recently, many applications have been identified in which observations are processed in a distributed manner and decisions are made at the distributed processors, or processed data (compressed observations) are conveyed to a fusion center that makes the global decision. Conventional detection theory has been extended so that it can deal with such distributed...

Monitoring of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue, especially after the recent flurry of terrorist attacks including the one on the Word Trade Center in September 2001. It is, therefore, imperative that effective multisensor surveillance systems be developed to protect the society from similar attacks in the future. The new generation of surveillance systems to be developed have a specific requirement: they must be able to automatically identify criminal and terrorist activity without sacrificing individual privacy to the extent possible....

This book provides an introductory treatment of the fundamentals of decision-making in a distributed framework. Classical detection theory assumes that complete observations are available at a central processor for decision-making. More recently, many applications have been identified in which observations are processed in a distributed manner and decisions are made at the distributed processors, or processed data (compressed observations) are conveyed to a fusion center that makes the global decision. Conventional detection theory has been extended so that it can deal with such distributed...

This compilation focuses on multisensor fusion aspects of video monitoring and surveillance. It addresses several current research and application issues by providing a selective set of invited contributions on topics ranging from complex event detection and human behavior understanding to biometric feature extraction for combating terrorism. Contributors to this volume are from the leading international laboratories in the field of video surveillance. The authors include coverage of numerous technical problems related to image monitoring of complex sites using multiple sensors, and apply...