Multimodal Safety System for the Surveillance of Airport Areas

Airports represent key hubs in the international transport system. Any disruption of critical airport infrastructure may thus have disastrous and wide-ranging consequences. Disruptions may be in the form of illegal intrusion and trespassing on airport grounds or unauthorised parking of vehicles or placing of objects in restricted or critical airside areas, e.g. taxiways. Most of the systems currently in use are based on unimodal data, which means that they evaluate data of only one type of sensor (e.g. video cameras) and do not take signals from other sensors into account. The present project was thus aimed at developing fundamentals for a multimodal monitoring system designed to ensure the efficient and effective surveillance of airside areas. One special sensor used within the project belongs to the group of seismic sensors. This sensor had been buried in soil over a range of 1200 m and the resulting signals out of several test measurements where saved in a signal database. The main focus of the work, however, was the development and implementation of the detection algorithms in the different modalities allowing both object detection and object tracking with simultaneous track visualisation. In addition, different methods for the combination of the modalities were investigated. The deployment of various different sensors and subsequent intelligent processing and combination of the detection results will help to safeguard the security of extensive airport premises in the future.