In this talk, I will describe a novel approach for detecting unattended packages in surveillance video. Unlike the traditional approach to just detecting stationary objects in monitored scenes, our approach detects unattended packages based on accumulated knowledge about human and non-human objects from continuous object tracking and classification. We
design different reasoning rules for detecting different scenarios of the unattended package events. In the case where a package is left unattended by a single person explicitly, a rule using human activity recognition is introduced to decide the package ownership. In the case where a suspicious package is dropped down by a group of humans or under heavy occlusions, a rule based on historic tracking and classification information is proposed. Furthermore, an additional rule is given to reduce false alarms that may happen with traditional stationary object detection methods.

About Jian Zhang
Jian Zhang is a Conjoint Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Dr Zhang earned his Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering from East Normal University, China in 1982; a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Flinders University, South Australia in 1994; and completed a PhD from School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, UNSW@ADFA, Australian Defence Force Academy, at the University of New South Wales in 1997. In 1997, Dr. Zhang joined the Visual Information Processing Lab, Motorola Labs in Sydney as a senior research engineer and later became a principal research engineer and foundation manager of Visual Communications Research Team, Motorola Labs, Sydney. While at Motorola labs, he worked on a range of research projects including image processing, video coding and communication, image segmentation and multimedia content adaptation. Apart from paper publication from his research output, he was co-author of more than ten patents filed in US, UK, Japan and Australia. Since 2004, Dr Zhang has been a Principal Researcher with National ICT Australia (NICTA), where is a group leader of Multimedia and Video Communications Research Group (MMVC) at NICTA Sydney Lab in UNSW Kensington campus. He leads three NICTA research projects in the areas of computer vision, multimedia content analysis and management, and multimedia content indexing and query. His research interests include multimedia content management; video understanding; and video coding and communication. Multimedia content management provides advanced algorithms to manage, index search, and retrieve rich multimedia content. Video understanding is concerned with the automatic or semi-automatic extraction of semantic information from video sequences. Video coding and communication provides an efficient method for video compression and robust transmission. He is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions  on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT) and a member of the Program Committee for several international conferences.