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A comprehensive overview of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities.Drone technology has garnered critical attention across many fields, from engineering to the humanities. While the first wave of drone scholarship was key in initiating the debate on drones, it also privileged the idea of the “scopic regime”—a militarized regime of hypervisuality—in its analyses of the connection between vision and power. The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities broadens the drone's spectrum of perception by acknowledging its creative, life-affirming possibility with the notion of the sensorium. The sensorium of the drone is a multimedia, synesthetic sensing assemblage in which the human agent is enmeshed with the drone. Drone sensoria can sense in many more ways than the scopic regime—with sound, touch, smell, temperature, and movement.In The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities, Kathrin Maurer shows how drone sensoria can change our understanding of human communities by constructing imaginaries of social communities based on decentralized and fluid sensing processes. Maurer takes an aesthetic approach to technology, working with two understandings of aesthetics. One understanding refers to aesthetics as a way of experiencing, and it explores how the drone-human assemblage perceives the world. The other refers to aesthetic mimetic representation, and focuses on how aesthetic drone imaginaries in literature, popular culture, visual arts, and films negotiate the sensorial technology of the drone.Bringing together key ideas in technology studies, studies of aerial views, visual and aesthetic studies, posthuman sensing, machine–human interaction, and communities, The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities sheds a welcome and necessary light on this technology's creative potential as well as its dangers and risks.

This book addresses surveillance in action-related applications, and presents novel research on military, civil and cyber surveillance from an international team of experts. The first part of the book, Surveillance of Human Features, reviews surveillance systems that use biometric technologies. It discusses various novel approaches to areas including gait recognition, face-based physiology-assisted recognition, face recognition in the visible and infrared bands, and cross-spectral iris recognition.The second part of the book, Surveillance for Security and Defense, discusses the ethical issues raised by the use of surveillance systems in the name of combatting terrorism and ensuring security. It presents different generations of satellite surveillance systems and discusses the requirements for real-time satellite surveillance in military contexts. In addition, it explores the new standards of surveillance using unmanned air vehicles and drones, proposes surveillance techniquesfor detecting stealth aircrafts and drones, and highlights key techniques for maritime border surveillance, bio-warfare and bio-terrorism detection.The last part of the book, Cyber Surveillance, provides a review of data hiding techniques that are used to hinder electronic surveillance. It subsequently presents methods for collecting and analyzing information from social media sites and discusses techniques for detecting internal and external threats posed by various individuals (such as spammers, cyber-criminals, suspicious users or extremists in general). The book concludes by examining how high-performance computing environments can be exploited by malicious users, and what surveillance methods need to be put in place to protect these valuable infrastructures. The book is primarily intended for military and law enforcement personnel who use surveillance-related technologies, as well as researchers, Master's and Ph.D. students who are interested in learning about the latest advances in military, civilian and cyber surveillance.

Intelligent multimedia surveillance concerns the analysis of multiple sensing inputs including video and audio streams, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and depth data. These data are processed for the automated detection and tracking of people, vehicles, and other objects. The goal is to locate moving targets, to understand their behavior, and to detect suspicious or abnormal activities for crime prevention. Despite its benefits, there is societal apprehension regarding the use of such technology, so an important challenge in this research area is to balance public safety and privacy. This edited book presents recent findings in the field of intelligent multimedia surveillance emerging from disciplines such as multimedia computing, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. It consists of nine chapters addressing intelligent video surveillance, video analysis of crowds, privacy issues in intelligent multimedia surveillance, RFID technology for localization of objects, object tracking using visual saliency information, estimating multiresolution depth using active stereo vision, and performance evaluation for video surveillance systems. The book will be of value to researchers and practitioners working on related problems in security, multimedia, and artificial intelligence.

The Web has become a rich source of personal information in the last few years. People twitter, blog, and chat online. Current feelings, experiences or latest news are posted. For instance, first hints to disease outbreaks, customer preferences, or political changes could be identified with this data. Surveillance or early warning systems enable such detection of changes and support humans in getting information on changing situations. However, the variety of data that could be considered for surveillance is immense, ranging from sensor-measured values to collected counts and information extracted from natural language documents.Denecke's objective is to introduce the multiple possibilities and facets of surveillance and its applications. She first introduces the task of surveillance and provides an overview on surveillance in various domains. Next, the various information sources that are available and could already be used by surveillance systems are summarized. In the main part of the book, her focus is on unstructured data as a source for surveillance. An overview on existing methods as well as methods to be developed in order to process this kind of data with respect to surveillance is presented. As an example application, she introduces disease surveillance using Web 2.0, including corresponding methods and challenges to be addressed. The book closes with remarks on new possibilities for surveillance gained by recent developments of the Internet and mobile communication, and with an outline of future challenges.

Surveillance systems have become increasingly popular. Full involvement of human operators has led to shortcomings, e.g. high labor cost, limited capability for multiple screens, inconsistency in long-duration, etc. Intelligent surveillance systems (ISSs) can supplement or even replace traditional ones. In ISSs, computer vision, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence technologies are used to identify abnormal behaviours in videos. They present the development of real-time behaviour-based intelligent surveillance systems. The book focuses on the detection of individual abnormal behaviour based on learning and the analysis of dangerous crowd behaviour based on texture and optical flow. Practical systems include a real-time face classification and counting system, a surveillance robot system that utilizes video and audio information for intelligent interaction, and a robust person counting system for crowded environments.

The development of technologies for the identi?cation of individuals has driven the interest and curiosity of many people. Spearheaded and inspired by the Bertillon coding system for the classi?cation of humans based on physical measurements, scientists and engineers have been trying to invent new devices and classi?cation systems to capture the human identity from its body measurements. One of the main limitations of the precursors of today's biometrics, which is still present in the vast majority of the existing biometric systems, has been the need to keep the device in close contact with the subject to capture the biometric measurements. This clearly limits the applicability and convenience of biometric systems. This book presents an important step in addressing this limitation by describing a number of methodologies to capture meaningful biometric information from a distance. Most materials covered in this book have been presented at the International Summer School on Biometrics which is held every year in Alghero, Italy and which has become a?agship activity of the IAPR Technical Committee on Biometrics (IAPR TC4). The last four chapters of the book are derived from some of the best p- sentations by the participating students of the school. The educational value of this book is also highlighted by the number of proposed exercises and questions which will help the reader to better understand the proposed topics.