Surveillance systems. Annual report 2013

This annual report gives an account of the activities carried out and the results in the second year of the three-year Armed Forces' project Surveillance Systems. The project studies how various sensor systems can co-operate to accomplish improved situation awareness in the urban environment. With multi-sensor data as a base, important research tasks are here to devise robust data fusion methods and algorithms for detection, classification, and tracking of human movements and to develop methods for automated detection of deviations from the normal state. The research efforts of the project are concentrated on the following military need areas: Continuous Surveillance, Crowd Surveillance, and Blue Force Tracking. The project participates in several international co-operations, viz., three EU FP7 projects and the NATO group Multi- Sensor Integration for Urban Operations. In the area of Continuous Surveillance we have developed the methodology for combining sensor data, for target tracking based on multiple sensors like cameras and microphones, as well as for sensor data evaluation. In smaller study segments, we have also analyzed how radar and laser based sensors function as component parts beside other sensor types like cameras and microphones. The methods for group detection and movement patterns have been evaluated on generally available data on the Internet as well as on simulated data. The evaluations show that the two methods studied have some different advantages and drawbacks. The first method gives more information than the second: among other things, it also delivers the speed and direction of the groups. On the other hand, the second method needs considerably less computation time and can also be used for describing the dynamics of a specific group, in a rather simple manner. In the area of Blue Force Tracking, new techniques are being investigated to follow one's own soldiers in buildings where GPS coverage is missing. With our own-developed test system Chameleon, we have by using the SLAM-technique (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) pointed to the possibility to determine one's own position and simultaneously to construct a map of the interior of the building. This year's work has mainly been focused on including thermal infrared cameras with the previous, visual stereo-camera and the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), and on improving position estimate by recording point clouds. We have in experiments performed at MSS Kvarn, and elsewhere, shown that the estimate obtained with the help of supplementing infrared cameras is very close to the true trajectory. With a test system of our own construction, the potential is being investigated of our RF-based "silent" method of positioning soldiers in buildings. The test system has been developed further to enable three-dimensional positioning, which means implementation of sequential transmission and reception in hardware and software. The evaluation of performed tests of one-dimensional positioning shows qualitatively that the concept works also in a complex environment with multipath propagation. By participation in the NATO group new important knowledge is established of how different sensors and sensor systems are suitably combined to obtain improved situation awareness in urban operations. An important basis is the results from the joint multi-sensor measurements carried out in German Bonnland. This year's work has mainly involved delivering a basis for the final report which will be issued in 2014.