SPUTERS: An Integrated Traffic Surveillance and Emergency Response Architecture

Abstract

Secure Progressively Updatable Traffic Emergency Response System (SPUTERS) is a framework for collecting traffic-surveillance data in crash-prone areas of roadways. SPUTERS receives as input video, audio, and text-based data from an integrated collection of distributed cameras and sensors, both vehicle-borne and those embedded in the roadway infrastructure. Under nominal roadway operating conditions, the multimedia data are used to develop incident countermeasures. During degraded modes of roadway operation, SPUTERS generates progressive updates to create a shared situational awareness among the people who orchestrate responses to traffic incidents and emergencies. In addition to addressing performance-oriented quality-of-service requirements for interactive display of data on handheld devices, SPUTERS relies on role-based access control to safeguard the privacy of roadway users under surveillance, preventing privileged information collected and managed by the system from being leaked to unauthorized persons. In order to enhance security, SPUTERS uses symmetric key encryption to guard against the unauthorized alteration of the surveillance data.

Keywords:

• Incident Response
• Privacy
• Real-Time Multimedia
• Security
• Traffic Surveillance

Notes

^a A violation of privacy occurs when a party who holds access to privileged data disseminates that data in an unauthorized manner to a third party. Once the third party has obtained the information, the originator of the information has little or no control over its further dissemination.

^a A system-of-systems is a federation of legacy systems and developing systems that provide an enhanced capability greater than that of any of the individual systems within the system-of-systems.

^a Extensible Markup Language (XML) is used to structure Web documents, that is, for defining document types.

^a The latter can be viewed as a mandatory form of information filtering in which the user has no discretion over setting his or her profile for receiving information.

^a A regular language is one that is accepted by a finite automaton.