PSCR 2016 Workshop on Video Analytics in Public Safety (VAPS 201

Tentative Date and Location: June 6, 2016 in San Diego, CA as a satellite workshop of the NIST PSCR Conference on June 7-9.  Please email VAPS-info@nist.gov to be added to the VAPS announcement list for further updates.

VAPS: NIST, the OSTP NITRD Video and Image Analytics (VIA) Interagency Working Group, and the DHS-led Video Quality in Public Safety (VQiPS) Working Group are joining forces to foster the creation of a technically diverse Video Analytics in Public Safety (VAPS) community of interest (CoI) to develop a national R&D strategy in this emerging area and begin critical collaboration, R&D, measurement, and standards activities.  The PSCR VAPS 2016 Workshop is the formal kickoff for the VAPS CoI.

The strategic priorities identified by the initial VAPS effort will be mapped into the “Interagency Strategy for Research and Development in Visible World Image and Video Analytic Technologies” being developed by NITRD VIA as well as to the NIST PSCR Analytics Roadmap and future DHS VQiPS collaboration and best practices activities.    Future VAPS activities will help to focus and link research, collaboration, and standards activities across stakeholders to support the development of a robust and interoperable public safety video analytics ecosystem that meets the nation’s growing needs. 

Background:Video analytics is an emerging technology area focused on automating the laborious tasks of monitoring live streams of video, streamlining video communications and storage, providing timely alerts, and making the task of searching enormous archives of video tractable.  Public safety video analytics research, development, and standards activities have lagged behind such developments in other domains.  Given the explosion of video in public safety, the strategic incorporation of next-generation video analytics into public safety systems and workflows is critically important. Video analytics will play an essential role at the collection devices, in the public safety communication networks, in the data management back ends, and in real-time interactions across a variety of stakeholders and automated systems that span agencies, jurisdictions, and sectors.

VAPS Workshop: The purpose of the workshop will be to bring together perspectives from diverse technical stakeholder communities to jointly identify needs and priorities for research, measurement, collaboration, and standards related to:

  • critically important public safety video analytics research and development priorities
  • collaboration and collaboration-enhancing public safety RD&E video analytics frameworks
  • best practices and open standards related to the implementation of video analytics in public safety

The workshop will be the kickoff for the VAPS CoI and will be focused on identifying the challenges, gaps, opportunities, and needs related to public safety video analytic technology R&D, collaboration, and standards.  The workshop will include perspectives from the Public Safety Community, Legal/Policy/Social Science Community, Video/Multimedia Technology Research Community, Human-Computer Interaction Community, Industry, and the Federal R&D community.

Pre-Workshop Perspective Panels: Because the VAPS goal is to integrate a diverse set of perspectives and the workshop will be a one-day event, we will launch pre-workshop telecon panels within each of the above stakeholder communities to develop a summary of the panels’ perspectives.  Panel summaries will be presented at the workshop in lieu of talks so that we can maximize discussion time.  These summaries will also provide the priority inputs for the workshop.  Your participation in these panels will therefore be extremely important.  Please stay tuned for panel formation announcements.

This is the first event in what is planned to become a standing community of interest. VAPS will become an ongoing resource for collaboration and implementation activities that will accelerate the realization of the priorities called out in the workshop and increase critical R&D mass in this important technology area.

 This effort is sponsored by the NIST Information Technology Lab (ITL), NIST Communications Technology Lab (CTL), the DHS Science and Technology Directorate – Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (DHS/S&T/OIC), and the OSTP Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program.