NICTA to build advanced surveillance system for national security

Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence (NICTA), has secured one million dollars in Commonwealth government funding to develop an advanced video surveillance demonstrator for the Port of Brisbane.

Awarded under the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s Research Support for National Security Program, the million dollar grant will be delivered in four tranches over the term of the project, with an expected completion date of December 2011.

“This new funding will help us build an advanced video surveillance system at the Port of Brisbane which could then be replicated in other settings where the protection and safety of people and critical infrastructure is important,” said Professor Brian Lovell, NICTA’s Advanced Surveillance Project Leader.

The new system, being developed at NICTA’s Queensland Research Laboratory, will combine NICTA technologies with commercially available, off-the-shelf surveillance tools.

NICTA’s contribution will include software that recognises individual faces from live video feeds and then matches them to a database, along with technology that improves the clarity of video footage taken in poor conditions, where images may be obscured by rain, dust or fog. The demonstrator will be further enhanced by NICTA’s sensor network research, which will link all of these capabilities, creating a robust, superior system.

“We plan to use the funding to develop a world-leading blueprint that will help ports, combat agencies and commercial security companies to secure their personnel and assets,” said Professor Terry Caelli, Director of NICTA’s Queensland Research Laboratory.