Life & Times: The Development of a Digital Video Surveillance System*

Over the past few years Los Alamos National Laboratory's Safeguards Systems Group has been working to develop an imagebased digital surveillance system designed to provide continuous monitoring of nuclear materials in storage or process. The goal of such a system is to provide automated technologies that will ensure the security of the nuclear materials and ultimately reduce the frequency of required physical inventories. This paper discusses the highlights and lowlights we have encountered while designing, developing, and field-testing a digital video surveillance system.