February 11, 2008

UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA RECEIVES $2 MILLION FOR GLOBALLY SIGNIFICANT SECURITY TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH

Today’s announcement represents the second round of funding under the Ontario Research Fund’s Research Excellence program. In this round, the government is providing $6,089,600 to support three world-class projects at the University of Ottawa.

Developing Next-generation Public Safety And Security Systems

Multimodal-Surveillance System for Security-Related Applications

Lead researcher: Professor Emil M. Petriu
Total project cost: $6,409,000
Provincial funding: $2,015,000

Researchers at the University of Ottawa are working on developing and commercializing a “multimodal surveillance system” using advanced surveillance sensors that can identify and evaluate body language patterns (gait, gestures, facial emotions, voice). The goal of the project is to develop new public safety and security systems that can monitor large public spaces such as airports, for potentially threatening behaviours. 

The vision of the project is to create “next generation” public safety and security systems that do not require the use of personal information; rather that can monitor (real-time) patterns of behaviour in high-security areas.

Key private sector partners:
IBM
IMS Inc
Vestec Inc.

Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence Program

This second round of funding under the Research Excellence program will invest  $114,709,614 to support 19 world-class projects at nine Ontario universities, institutes and hospitals. Funding will be matched by 107 major industry and other partners participating in the projects.

For more information about the Ontario Research Fund, please visit www.ontario.ca/innovation.

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