A generic framework to support participatory surveillance through crowdsensing

Harnessing the power and popularity of participatory or opportunistic sensing for the purpose of providing added value security and surveillance services is a promising research direction. However, challenges such as increased privacy concerns, as well as technological issues related to the reliable processing and meaningful analysis of the collected data, hinder the widespread deployment of participatory surveillance applications. We present here our work on addressing some of the aforementioned concerns through our related participatory application that focuses on crisis management and in particular buildings' evacuation. We discuss the technical aspects of our work, the viability and practicality of which is validated by means of a real experiment comprising 14 users in the context of an emergency evacuation exercise.