In this paper, we describe an integrated solution devised for In-House Video Surveillance, to control the safety of people living in a domestic environment. The system is composed of a robust moving object detection module, able to disregard shadows, a tracking module designed for large occlusion solution and of a posture detector. Shadows, large occlusions and deformable model of people are key features of in-house surveillance. Moreover, the requirements of high speed reaction to dangerous situations and the need to implement a reliable and low cost tele-viewing system, led to the introduction of a new multimedia model of semantic transcoding, capable to support different user’s requests and constraints of their devices (PDA, smart phones,…). Our application context is the emerging area of Domotics (from the Latin word domus that means “home ” and informatics) and, in particular, indoor video surveillance of the house where people with some difficulties (elders and disabled people) can now live in a sufficient degree of autonomy, thanks to the strong interaction with the new technologies that can be distributed in the house with affordable costs and high reliability. 1

In this paper, we focus on the framework of In-House Video Surveillance to control the safety of people living in domestic environments. In this context, common problems and general purpose computer vision techniques are discussed and implemented in an integrated solution composed of a robust moving object detection module, which is able to disregard shadows, a tracking module designed to handle large occlusions and a posture detector. Shadows, large occlusions and deformable models of people are the key problems that must be taken into account for in-house surveillance. Moreover, the requirements of high speed reactions to dangerous situations and the need to implement a reliable and low cost tele-viewing system, led to the introduction of a new multimedia model of semantic transcoding, capable of supporting the different user’s requests and meeting the constraints of their devices (PDA, UMTS cellular phones, …). Our application context is the emerging area of Domotics (from the Latin word domus that means “home ” and informatics) and, in particular, indoor video surveillance, where people with some difficulties (elderly and disabled people) can now live with a sufficient degree of autonomy, thanks to the strong interaction with the new technology that can be distributed in the house, with affordable costs and high reliability. 1