Monitoring practice: event detection and system design
Marcus Svensson, Christian Heath, Paul Luff · Institution of Engineering and Technology eBooks · 2006
In this chapter, the authors show how detailed understandings of everyday surveillance work and organisational conduct may inform the design and development of image processing systems to enhance the awareness and monitoring of complex physical and behavioural environments. The setting in question is the operations rooms of complex interconnecting stations on London Underground and other rapid urban transport systems in Europe. The research presented in this chapter is part of a recent EU-funded project (IST DG VII) known as PRISMATICA, concerned with enhancing support for security management including the development of technologies for surveillance work in the public transport domain. This chapter considers one particular system currently developed to support real-time monitoring of complex environments an integrated surveillance architecture that can process data from multiple cameras and automatically identify particular events. The chapter begins by exploring the tacit knowledge and practices on which operators rely in identifying and managing events and then briefly reflect on the implications of these observations for the design of technical systems to support surveillance. By examining how operators in this domain oversee a complex organisational setting, and the resource on which they rely to identify and manage events, we are considering the everyday practices of monitoring as well as the practical development of the technologies to support it.