Abstract
Urban environments present unique challenges from the perspective of surveillance and security. Threat activity in urban environments tends to be very similar to background activity, while the volume of activity is often very high. The widespread geographical area presents issues from the perspective of response. These characteristics of urban environments create challenges to traditional applications of video analytics technologies and opens up opportunities for novel approaches. This paper explores the applicability of video analytics in various scenarios presented in urban surveillance situations. We also describe novel technical solutions to some of the challenges of urban surveillance. © 2009 IEEE.