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Traditional surveillance technology has been quite slow to embrace the advantages of digital image processing.  In part this has been because the sheer volumes of data have required analogue storage methods such as lapsed time video recorders, and in part because the cost of moving to a digital base have been prohibitive.  In the last few years however, costs have fallen dramatically, whilst processing power and capabilities have improved equally fast.  This allows many of the shortcomings of traditional surveillance applications to be addressed, whilst also considering many of society's concerns about privacy and intrusion.

Movement detection, and many more sophisticated forms of image analysis can be coupled with new sensor technology to allow much more pro-active monitoring and alarms. Use of 'region of interest' enhancement allow accurate identification of suspects while excluding from analysis, and subsequent public exposure, the innocent bystander.  Tight control can be exerted over the user of surveillance technology - for example showing sufficient details to allow recognition of an individual found to have passed a stolen cheque, whilst not permitting enough detail to allow a corrupt viewer of the scene to be able to view and copy a signature being made.

The need for stored evidence to be of a sufficient high quality however also raises concerns and a need for protection against tampering and fabrication.  It is very easy within the digital environment to change either subtly or completely aspects of an image, and the metadata surrounding it.  Techniques such as encryption and watermarking can be used to help protect against this risk, but there is a real need for well accepted media management techniques which can help reduce risks in this area, for example using trusted third parties and crypto-technology.  In addition, it is important that evidence is not segmented, being kept in a single file to avoid the obvious risks of mis-information.

Many of these aspects point to the potential usefulness of JPEG 2000 in this environment:

• the use of Motion JPEG 2000 has obvious advantages in catching sequences of actions, in which the initial view could be at low resolution, switching under the monitor's control to higher resolutions, faster frame rates, and including more metadata and regions of interest
  
• the file formats defined for JPEG 2000 allow both standardised and user metadata to be stored with the image data
  
• the new parts of JPEG 2000 extend its usefulness by adding new security support, effective client server communications, and an ability to link its features into an error-prone wireless infrastructure
  
• as a standard, costs of implementing the technology should be considerably lower than using proprietary technology with less risk of 'lock in'