A vision towards automatic inference of hostile intent from sensory observations

A vision towards automatic inference of hostile intent from sensory observations

Burghouts, G.J.
Schutte, K.

2011

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 27th of May 2010. The national security authorities call out to secure the area around the central train station. 150 Security officers, both military and police, are instructed to guard the area and to pick out those people with hostile intent. Although the officers were very effective in assessing people’s nervousness and where they were looking, - a lot of other indicators were hard for them to recognize. In many cases the officers did not recognize particular indicators. At TNO, we have a vision on the technology to support them. So how to solve the puzzle of discovering somebody with bad intentions? Evidence exists that hostile intent can be detected from particular behaviors. Psychological experiments with CCTV videos demonstrated that humans can very well assess whether particular behaviors hint at a future escalation. Also, from analysis of other attacks, we have learned that some clues were visible from the surveillance cameras. This observation led to a compilation of so-called ‘deviant behaviors’. The list is categorized by indicators that relate to respectively the appearance of a person, his or her specific behavior and objects that are carried, touched or exchanged. With these ‘deviant behaviors’, the problem of ‘intent recognition’ can be decomposed into realistic challenges of early detection of specific behavioral indicators. We distinguish between four types of features: (1) trajectories (e.g. where did somebody move, with whom did the person interact), (2) appearance of the person as a whole (e.g. the pose and entropy), (3) body parts and spatiotemporal features, (4) physiological properties (e.g. the change of body temperature, sweat or heart beat). For category 4 we investigated whether vital life signs can be monitored at a distance, together with a renowned health-care innovator. Whereas this is still very rudimentary, current research focuses on categories 1, 2 and 3. These properties demonstrated to be very discriminative, especially when they are combined. Inspired by trained police and soldiers, we have build software to combine behavioral indicators on the spot, the ‘0+0+0=1’ principle.

Physics & Electronics
II - Intelligent Imaging
TS - Technical Sciences
Safety and Security
Defence, Safety and Security
Camera Surveillance
Deviant behavior
CCTV
Hostile intent

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6fc1042e-4b55-444a-9e48-3f8d1000b5d1

462326

NATO-RTO, Neuilly-sur-Seine

8th NATO Military Sensing Symposium (SET-169), Friedrichshafen, Germany, May 16-18, 2011.

conference paper