Towards a forensic event ontology to assist video surveillance-based vandalism detection

The detection and representation of events is a critical element in automated surveillance systems. We present here an ontology for representing complex semantic events to assist video surveillance-based vandalism detection. The ontology contains the definition of a rich and articulated event vocabulary that is aimed at aiding forensic analysis to objectively identify and represent complex events. Our ontology has then been applied in the context of London Riots, which took place in 2011. We report also on the experiments conducted to support the classification of complex criminal events from video data.