Video surveillance in Emilia Romagna as a Service

This 6-month project (Dec. 2010-June 2011) is funded by Lepida SpA and involves, other than Imagelab, IBM Italia Spa, Vitrociset Spa and CSP Spa. The objective of the project is to develop an integrated system of video management and video analysis "as a service", where public administrations (in particular, small municipalities of Region Emilia-Romagna) can borrow from Lepida, in addition to the high-bandwidth connectivity, also the management, storage and analysis of a large number of cameras.

The project is a joint project with IBM Italia, Vitrociset and CSP Piemonte for the development of a software infrastructure for “Video Surveillance as a Service” based on a VMS (Video Management System) open source (Zoneminder) and a set of algorithms for video analysis to be integrated with it. The resulting platform allows to remotely send video streams to a central server (owned and managed by Lepida spa) for storing and searching videos from multiple camera and to successively analyze these streams to detect certain events, stored in a database and to be retrieve at request. The “as a Service” paradigm is of crucial importance for small companies and authorities which do not want to invest money of complex (and expensive) servers with their own VMS and video analysis engine.

Publications