Kay Award to a researcher from the Hebrew University for a development that enables the presentation of a summary from security footage

The award will be presented to the researcher as part of the university's 73rd Board of Trustees events

Every day, millions of security cameras record our activities around the clock and provide information that helps to catch criminals. However, continuous viewing of the many security cameras requires a lot of manpower and precious time. Now, a researcher from the Hebrew University has developed a solution to the problem that will save a lot of time and resources in retrieving the information captured by these cameras - computer software that provides a video summary from many hours of video while preserving the main information captured.

Prof. Shmuel Peleg from the Benin School of Engineering and Computer Science of the Hebrew University, who developed the method, will receive the Kay Award for Innovative Developments for it as part of the university's 73rd Board of Trustees events this coming June.

In the developed method, the video abstract separates the static background and the moving objects in space. The summary simultaneously shows many events recorded by the video camera at different times. The user of the software can watch all the events that happened for hours in a very short and concentrated time, labeling the objects that appear in the video according to the original time of occurrence. For example, instead of seeing 30 characters spread across a 150-minute tape, we will see all 30 in a few concentrated minutes. The summary is made while preserving the original video so that you can watch the original segments of each event at length by selecting the object you are interested in from the summary.

"The development provides an answer to the problem that arises from watching long hours recorded by the security cameras," explains Prof. Peleg. "Studies indicate that people lose attention watching this type of monotonous video after about 20 minutes."

Prof. Peleg's invention was submitted as a patent application by the Hebrew University's Development and Research Company, and was recently commercialized to the Israeli start-up company BriefCam, which developed the product and began selling it to security companies around the world.

The Kay Award for Innovative Developments will be awarded to Prof. Peleg on June 9, 2010 as part of the Hebrew University's 73rd Board of Trustees events. The Kay Award for Innovation has been awarded annually since 1994. Yitzhak Kay from England, a prominent industrialist in the pharmaceutical industry, founded the practice of awarding awards to encourage faculty members and students of the Hebrew University to develop innovative methods with commercial potential that will contribute to the university and society.

You can see how the method works In this link (Click on the videos on the left to see how it works)