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About Integrated Surveillance of Crowded Areas for Public Security

The main goal of the Integrated Surveillance of Crowded Areas for Public Security (ISCAPS) project is to reinforce security for the European citizen and to downsize the terrorist threat by reducing the risks of malicious events. This will be undertaken by providing efficient, real-time, user-friendly, highly automated surveillance of crowded areas which are significantly exposed to terrorist attacks.

Through a two year approach, the objectives of the project are to promote technological surveillance research guided by a system approach in order to bring the research to maturity and to validate it in existing sites.

Three types of crowded areas will be considered:

• open areas in which there are many entry and exit points and where there exists no approach to control identification at such points;
• channelled areas were there are few entry and exit points, but where there is no possibility to employ a full biometric identification - for example, street or commercial centre);
• restricted area in which strict controls and full biometric identification can be performed at entry points (for example, in an amusement park). ISCAPS will concentrate on the early, proactive detection of major threatening events linked to terrorism and crime, often cross-cut.

ISCAPS activities breakdown into research on threatening scenarios and operational requirements, research on key technologies (sensors, information processing and threat detection, communications, system configuration and security), open system architectures, component integration, validation and demonstration. ISCAPS will employ a combination of sensors - visible camera, IR camera, biometrics, tags - in order to increase the quality of identification and tracking of persons, goods and vehicles.

ISCAPS brings together 10 partners who have participated in major previous projects in civil-military threat detection and will bring to the project the most recent progress made in these domains.

The Project involves 10 European leading ICT companies and academic organisations:

• SAGEM
• BAE Systems
• Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique
• Datamat S.p.A.
• Elsag S.p.A.
• Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique
• GMV
• Societe Nationale des Chemins De Fer Francais
• The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research
• University of Reading