Mission
The main goal of surveillance and monitoring technologies is to ensure safety and incolumity of people, whether the threats come from others or from the environment. Such a goal can be articulated in different ways depending on the particular context: in the case of factories or working places, surveillance typically means to protect people from malfunctioning of potentially dangerous machinery. In the case of public spaces (stations, airports, avenues, roads, etc.), it often means to monitor the flow of large crowds through constrained spaces. In the case, of outdoor settings, surveillance typically means early detection of criminal and violent behaviours, and the list could continue.
Together with the traditional scenarios above, surveillance technologies deal now with situations and contexts that propose new challenges and opportunities. Social media have become the place where we interact with both acquainted and unacquainted individuals and, hence, the potential theatre of abuses and criminal behaviour. Furthermore, social media act as a distributed sensor gathering information about large scale social events, a potential source of unprecendentedly detailed information. Not to mention recent advances in affective computing and social signal processing that have extended the range of surveillance and monitoring technologies to domains previously considered unaccessible to computers such as social and psychological phenomena.
The common denominator to all above scenarios, however diverse they are, is that surveillance and monitoring technologies deal with humans and their behaviour. Therefore, no major progress can be done without integrating findings from human sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) that so far have been largely neglected in the surveillance community. The mission of SISM is to fill this gap by gathering researchers active in computer vision and pattern recognition, human sciences and automatic behavior understanding, in the same spirit as it has been pursued in the previous editions of the workshop.