Biblio
The world is witnessing a remarkable increase in the usage of video surveillance systems. Besides fulfilling an imperative security and safety purpose, it also contributes towards operations monitoring, hazard detection and facility management in industry/smart factory settings. Most existing surveillance techniques use hand-crafted features analyzed using standard machine learning pipelines for action recognition and event detection. A key shortcoming of such techniques is the inability to learn from unlabeled video streams. The entire video stream is unlabeled when the requirement is to detect irregular, unforeseen and abnormal behaviors, anomalies. Recent developments in intelligent high-level video analysis have been successful in identifying individual elements in a video frame. However, the detection of anomalies in an entire video feed requires incremental and unsupervised machine learning. This paper presents a novel approach that incorporates high-level video analysis outcomes with incremental knowledge acquisition and self-learning for autonomous video surveillance. The proposed approach is capable of detecting changes that occur over time and separating irregularities from re-occurrences, without the prerequisite of a labeled dataset. We demonstrate the proposed approach using a benchmark video dataset and the results confirm its validity and usability for autonomous video surveillance.
Video surveillance has been widely adopted to ensure home security in recent years. Most video encoding standards such as H.264 and MPEG-4 compress the temporal redundancy in a video stream using difference coding, which only encodes the residual image between a frame and its reference frame. Difference coding can efficiently compress a video stream, but it causes side-channel information leakage even though the video stream is encrypted, as reported in this paper. Particularly, we observe that the traffic patterns of an encrypted video stream are different when a user conducts different basic activities of daily living, which must be kept private from third parties as obliged by HIPAA regulations. We also observe that by exploiting this side-channel information leakage, attackers can readily infer a user's basic activities of daily living based on only the traffic size data of an encrypted video stream. We validate such an attack using two off-the-shelf cameras, and the results indicate that the user's basic activities of daily living can be recognized with a high accuracy.
Video surveillance, closed-circuit TV and IP-camera systems became virtually omnipresent and indispensable for many organizations, businesses, and users. Their main purpose is to provide physical security, increase safety, and prevent crime. They also became increasingly complex, comprising many communication means, embedded hardware and non-trivial firmware. However, most research to date focused mainly on the privacy aspects of such systems, and did not fully address their issues related to cyber-security in general, and visual layer (i.e., imagery semantics) attacks in particular. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of existing and novel threats in video surveillance, closed-circuit TV and IP-camera systems based on publicly available data. The insights can then be used to better understand and identify the security and the privacy risks associated with the development, deployment and use of these systems. We study existing and novel threats, along with their existing or possible countermeasures, and summarize this knowledge into a comprehensive table that can be used in a practical way as a security checklist when assessing cyber-security level of existing or new CCTV designs and deployments. We also provide a set of recommendations and mitigations that can help improve the security and privacy levels provided by the hardware, the firmware, the network communications and the operation of video surveillance systems. We hope the findings in this paper will provide a valuable knowledge of the threat landscape that such systems are exposed to, as well as promote further research and widen the scope of this field beyond its current boundaries.