Media

HKU research team to unveil smart software for
3D crime scene reconstruction and human target tracking

24 Jun 2014

A research team led by Professor Yizhou Yu of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has developed a computer software for reconstruction of past events in 3D from surveillance videos.

The project was supported by the Innovation and Technology Fund of the HKSAR Government.

The software can process multiple surveillance videos and create an informative and easy-to-comprehend 3D reenactment of a past event to assist an incident or crime investigation. Such a reenactment, which can synchronize video footages from a large number of surveillance cameras, should let investigators have a global situational understanding of a complex scenario without the need to loop through individual cameras, and provide useful reference for situations including crime scene reconstruction. The software can further help to identify and track targeted figures in the videos, based on features including body gestures, colour and texture of clothing and belongings.

Unlike existing video analytic software, the one developed by the HKU team is a lot more advanced in terms of three dimensional reconstruction and visualization capabilities, which will allow close-up examination of the actions of suspects or vehicles from all possible viewing angles.

Places that could benefit from this system include airports, harbours, casinos, shopping malls and busy city blocks, for crowd monitoring. It is very useful to government agencies, such as the police force, the immigration department, and the airport authority, for investigating incidents, crimes or terrorists.

Professor Yu and research team will hold a media conference to introduce the software, details are as follows:

Date: June 26, 2014 (Thursday)
Time: 11am
Venue: Venue: Room CB 328, Chow Yei Ching Building, HKU

For media enquiries please contact Ms Melanie Wan, Communications and Public Affairs Office, HKU (Tel: 2859 2600 / Email: melwkwan@hku.hk); or Ms Jolly Li, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 2241 5953 / E-mail: jollyli@hku.hk).