CCTV image library established

The Home Office Scientific Development Branch (HOSDB) is compiling a new image library to help evaluate new CCTV systems.

The new I-LIDS (imager y Library for Intelligent Detection Systems) has been designed to help test CCTV technology in real-world situations. Currently, systems have to be tested in a wide variety of environments and weather conditions, which can take up to a year, and technology is often superseded before it can be implemented.

HOSDB is producing three different sets of i-LIDS images. The i-LIDS public training set, the i-LIDS public testing set and the i-LIDS private evaluation set. The first two are intended for academic and commercial systems, with the last aimed at testing new systems that offer improvements over existing vision detection technologies such as the currently installed CCTV systems.

The use of automated CCTV based detection systems is growing, but to date, there has been no way of testing these systems with real-world scenarios. The HOSDB system offers an alternative to live testing that allows new systems to be evaluated quickly and efficiently. The practical application will be new vision based detection systems that are developed can be tested and deployed much more efficiently. The i-LIDS image sets should be available mid 2006.