There is a growing interest in the development and deployment of surveillance systems in public and private locations. Conventional approaches rely on the installation of wide area CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), but the explosion in the numbers of cameras that have to be monitored, the increasing costs of providing monitoring personnel and the limitations that humans have to maintain sustained levels of concentration severely limit the effectiveness of these systems. Advances in information and communication technologies, such as computer vision for face recognition and human behaviour analysis, digital annotation and storage of video, transmission of video/audio streams over wired and wireless networks, can potentially provide significant improvements in this field.

Dr. Sergio Velastin obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester for work on vision systems for pedestrian and vehicular monitoring. He has led the Video Research Laboratory at King's College London and then joined the Digital Imaging Research Centre (DIRC) at Kingston University, where he is currently a Reader. He has chaired three consecutive IEE International Symposia on distributed surveillance systems and imaging.

• Chapter 1: A review of the state-of-the-art in distributed surveillance systems
• Chapter 2: Monitoring practice: event detection and system design
• Chapter 3: A distributed database for effective management and evaluation of CCTV systems
• Chapter 4: A distributed domotic surveillance system
• Chapter 5: A general-purpose system for distributed surveillance and communication
• Chapter 6: Tracking objects across uncalibrated, arbitrary topology camera networks
• Chapter 7: A distributed multi-sensor surveillance system for public transport applications
• Chapter 8: Tracking football players with multiple cameras
• Chapter 9: A hierarchical multi-sensor framework for event detection in wide environments