BHAMS (Beach Human Activity Monitoring System) is an integrated system for monitoring beach human activities, in real time.
The basic hardware components constituting the BHAMS system are:
- A state-of-the-art spherical video camera, consisting of 5-6 integrated video cameras that can provide a 360o view of the beach
- A thermal video camera
- An infrared video camera
- Cameras controlled by the Orasis system
- Various Handy-cams.
The system (presented here) is used for detecting people in the water, for safety and lifesaving operations and has a control software and interface that integrates the images from all cameras into an interactive user-friendly environment, so that the user/viewer is in total control of the viewpoint; he/she is able to select different beach locations and ‘transfer’ the viewpoint to the standard video cameras (the location of which are indicated by ‘hot spots’ in the spherical images) so that more detailed views of a particular part of the coastal area could be obtained.
A synthesis of simultaneous snapshots is presented below, depicting all of the available camera types used for the BHAMS system.
