Acceptance of automatic situation assessment in surveillance systems

In today's surveillance systems, there is a need for enhancing the situation awareness of an operator. Supporting the situation assessment process can be done by extending the system with a module for automatic interpretation of the observed environment. In this article we introduce a consistent terminology for the domain of intelligent surveillance systems. We clarify the separation of the real world and the world model, which is used for the internal representation in the system. For the definition of an automatic situation assessment module, we make use of an existing conceptual framework. We will further introduce a concept for an internal representation of situations of interest and show how the existence of such situations can be inferred from sensor observations. Based on these considerations, an automatic situation assessment module for a maritime surveillance system was developed. The module was evaluated with a small user group and the results show that such a n automatic support reduces the workload of the user and is highly accepted.