With technological advances digital video and imaging are becoming more and more relevant. Medical, remote-learning, surveillance, conferencing and home monitoring are just a few applications of these technologies. Along with compression, there is now a need for analysis and extraction of data. During the days of film and early digital cameras the processing and manipulation of data from such cameras was transparent to the end user. This transparency has been decreasing and the industry is moving towards `smart users' - people who will be enabled to program and manipulate their video and imaging systems. Smart cameras can currently zoom, refocus and adjust lighting by sourcing out current from the camera itself to the headlight. Such cameras are used in the industry for inspection, quality control and even counting objects in jewelry stores and museums, but could eventually allow user defined programmability. However, all this will not happen without interactive software as well as capabilities in the hardware to allow programmability. In this research, compression, expansion and detail extraction from videos in the surveillance arena are addressed. Here, a video codec is defined that can embed contextual details of a video stream depending on user defined requirements creating a video summary. This codec also carries out motion based segmentation that helps in object detection. Once an object is segmented it is matched against a database using its shape and color information. If the object is not a good match, the user can either add it to the database or consider it an anomaly. RGB vector angle information is used to generate object descriptors to match objects to a database. This descriptor implicitly incorporates the shape and color information while keeping the size of the database manageable. Color images of objects that are considered `safe' are taken from various angles and distances (with the same background as that covered by the camera is question) and their RGB vector angle based descriptors constitute the information contained in the database. This research is a first step towards building a compression and detection system for specific surveillance applications. While the user has to build and maintain a database, there are no restrictions on the size of the images, zoom and angle requirements, thus, reducing the burden on the end user in creating such a database. This also allows use of different types of cameras and doesn't need a lot of up-front planning on camera location, etc.

This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power.In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980's and 90's and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level.In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit Leiden, 2007. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. [231]-241).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-137).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Member: Ackerman, Mark; Committee Member: Grinter, Rebecca; Committee Member: Mynatt, Elizabeth; Committee Member: Rodden, Thomas

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2004. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-152).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Texas, May, 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-135). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-83).