An integrated architecture for surveillance and monitoring in an archaeological site

Abstract

This paper describes an on-going work aimed at designing and deploying a system for the surveillance and monitoring of an archaeological site, namely the "Valley of the Temples" in Agrigento, Italy. Given the relevance of the site from an artistical and historical point of view, it is important to protect the monuments from malicious or simply incautious behavior; however, the vastity of the area to be monitored and the vague definition of its boundaries make it unpractical to provide extensive coverage through traditional sensors or similar devices. We describe the design of an architecture for the surveillance of the site and for the monitoring of the visitors' behavior consisting in an integrated framework of networked sensors and cameras. Information will be collected by a minimal set of cameras deployed only at critical spots and coupled with higher-performance wireless sensor nodes. Both sets of devices will be supported by more densely deployed lower-cost wireless sensor so that the system will fulfill the concurrent goals of being minimally intrusive and remaining both responsive and efficient. Sensed data will be processed locally whenever possible and convenient, or otherwise sent to a central intelligent unit that will perform further and more sophisticated analyses using a reasoning system, will infer a higher level representation of the outdoor environment, and finally will be able to fine-tune the action of remote devices.