The process of tracking and identifying developing situations is an ability of importance within the surveillance domain. We refer to this as situation recognition and believe that it can enhance situation awareness for decision makers. Situation recognition requires that many subproblems are solved. For instance, we need to establish which situations are interesting, how to represent these situations, and which inferable events and states that can be used for representing them. We also need to know how to track and identify situations and how to determine the correlation between present information about situations with knowledge. For some of these subproblems, data-driven approaches are suitable, whilst knowledge-driven approaches are more suitable for others. In this paper we discuss our current research efforts and goals concerning template-based situation recognition. We provide a categorization of approaches for situation recognition together with a formalization of the template-based situation recognition problem. We also discuss this formalization in the light of a pick-pocket scenario. Finally, we discuss future directions for our research on situation recognition. We conclude that situation recognition is an important problem to look into for enhancing the overall situation awareness of decision makers.

Date Published: 19 May 2009
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7352, Intelligent Sensing, Situation Management, Impact Assessment, and Cyber-Sensing, 735205 (19 May 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.818715

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7352:
Intelligent Sensing, Situation Management, Impact Assessment, and Cyber-Sensing
Stephen Mott; John F. Buford; Gabriel Jakobson, Editor(s)