S3: The IBM smart surveillance system: From transactional systems to observational systems

Pervasive sensor based systems are transforming Information Technology systems from being transactional in nature to being observational in nature. Observational systems are inherently distributed and capture information at a much finer grain of space and time. Enabling and building such systems also poses many technology challenges, extracting information from sensor signals, indexing and searching sensor meta-data, data mining and scalability. In this paper we use S3: The IBM Smart Surveillance System as an example of an observational system to explore several of these issues through real world deployment examples. © 2007 IEEE.