Security and safety assessment for cultural heritage: enhancing security profiles by wireless video-surveillance

Abstract

Museums, monuments, picture galleries and works of art represent major assets that need security and safety measures against both anthropic (thefts, vandalism, terrorism) and environmental threats. On behalf of the Compagnia di San Paolo, SiTI designed an assessment tool to score security and safety levels of cultural/artistic site. The project, called "Security and Safety Assessment of Cultural Heritage" (SESASS), provides a "protocol" to evaluate security and safety profiles through a process involving checklists in all relevant areas.The lack of a robust video-surveillance system clearly emerged as the most frequent weakness of a number of assessments: as a fact, the ability to recognize (and classify) objects, persons, human activities and behaviours "automatically", managing alarms criteria, is fundamental to (help) perform security tasks in a scalable way, overcoming typical limitations of a "pure human" approach. For this reason SiTI and ISMB decided to jointly focus on video-surveillance of cultural heritage, taking into account both technological aspects and organisational requirements (operative procedures). In this paper both the available technological solutions and the involved organizational and legal aspects are shortly overviewed.