Indian Cartographer, Vol. XXXII, 2012 77 Surveillance system based on Flash LiDAR Bharat Lohani, Siju Chacko, Suddhasheel Ghosh and Sandeep Sasidharan Geoinformatics Laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Kanpur, India 208 016 Email: blohani@iitk.ac.in Abstract The present day surveillance methods offer limited degree of efficiency and use for protecting one’s own territory and assets. There exists a need for investigating the new technologies available now for their possible application in surveillance. Flash LiDAR based range camera is one such newly introduced and promising technology. It has a number of advantages over conventional laser scanners which guarantee its application in a variety of fields including surveillance. The potential of this new technology in surveillance has still not been fully exploited which is the motivation behind this paper. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to propose a complete surveillance system using Flash LiDAR range camera with detailed investigation on data processing to identify and locate the intruders. In view of the non-availability of Flash LiDAR camera with the authors, the paper designs a system to simulate Flash Lidar data through an Optech ILRIS36D Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS). Further, the paper also proposes algorithms to detect the intruders and map its movement. The presence of the intruder has been simulated by placing a few dummies in the test area. TLS data are captured in field with few dummies placed, which show the presence of an intruder. The resulting intensity and range data are interpolated using an approach that ensures that data are analogous to those captured by a Flash LiDAR camera. The surveillance system proposed suggests capturing the range and intensity images of the area of interest at a pre-defined frequency which is decided on the basis of usual movement of an intruder. A set of such images, collected over different time-periods, when processed for change detection, yields the presence of potential intruder. Further algorithms separate signal from noise and identify the presence of a human intruder and its movement. The paper has shown successful use of the Flash LiDAR technology for surveillance, which has potential to become a non-intrusive, all-weather, day light independent, fully-automatic, long-range system in near future. Introduction The need for surveillance of a nation’s boundaries and assets has led to the development of a large variety of technologies ranging from the simple barbed wire to sophisticated sensors capable of detecting the movement or intrusion of any object considered to be hostile. India has a long international boundary with not-so-friendly neighbours surrounding it on all the sides. Thus, the security forces have to maintain a constant vigil for guarding the nation to protect it from regular infiltration of anti-national elements across its boundaries with the neighbouring nations. The monitoring of the international boundaries and the line of control is currently done using various physical as well as electromagnetic measures. The physical measures include the laying of minefields, booby traps, barbed wire fences, ditches, watch towers etc. The electromagnetic measures presently being used include Underground Sensors, Surveillance Radars and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. These measures have their own pros and cons and offer some degree of efficacy. However, there still is a need for furthering the efficiency and effectiveness of the existing surveillance systems with improved technologies which can offer better results in the long run. Any such new technology other than being capable of being effective in different environmental and weather conditions should also offer resistance from enemy jamming and detection. Existing methods for surveillance The technical report on Ground Surveillance Radars and Military Intelligence [1] classifies the intelligence gathered on the basis of their sources, namely, human intelligence, imagery intelligence, signal intelligence and measurement based intelligence. Manual surveillance of sensitive assets like data centers, petroleum refineries, railroad tracks, and airfield areas of operations are difficult. In such a scenario, video based surveillance systems have been found to be efficient. A smart video surveillance system using computer vision and pattern recognition has been discussed in [2]. An approach for total airport perimeter surveillance has been discussed in [3]. The system covers the long range using integrated and overlapping ground