Patent ID: 6970576

Claim:
A surveillance system comprising: (a) a first camera, positioned to have a field of view of a surveillance area, for providing images of said surveillance area, (b) a second camera for providing a higher quality image of at least a portion of the surveillance area, (c) an image processing means for making a qualitative assessment of the images provided by said first camera and for causing, when the image quality is inadequate, operation of said second camera to provide a higher quality image of said portion of the surveillance area requiring further analysis, (d) a data-base comprising at least one data-base source from the group comprising human operators, rule based systems, knowledge based systems, artificial intelligence systems, data-bases and algorithms, and (e) an image analysis means for analyzing the content of said higher quality images from said second camera with reference to said data-base, assessing whether any further analysis of the content of said higher quality images from said second camera is required, and controlling said second camera to provide further image information of any portion of said surveillance area requiring further analysis.