In the 21st century, international usage and interest in surveillance of public spaces is growing at an unprecedented pace in response to global terrorism. The research being conducted by the Security and Surveillance Group seeks to overcome the inadequacies of current surveillance techniques and meet the increased demand for improvements in human monitoring, following the immense costs of successful terrorist attacks. A solution may be found in advanced surveillance systems employing computer monitoring of all video feeds, delivering the alerts to human responders for triage. Indeed such systems may assist in maintaining the high level of vigilance required over many years to detect the rare events associated with terrorism - a well designed computer system is never caught off guard.

Current research is aimed at developing advanced security solutions based on computer vision and pattern recognition technologies and advanced embedded systems. These systems are being evaluated at several sites around Australia and overseas. This research has attracted national and international interest from agencies and has secured over $1.6 million in industry funding.