School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, Scotland, UK.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2021 Feb 18;6(1):11. doi: 10.1186/s41235-021-00277-2.
CCTV plays a prominent role in public security, health and safety. Monitoring large arrays of CCTV camera feeds is a visually and cognitively demanding task. Arranging the scenes by geographical proximity in the surveilled environment has been recommended to reduce this demand, but empirical tests of this method have failed to find any benefit. The present study tests an alternative method for arranging scenes, based on psychological principles from literature on visual search and scene perception: grouping scenes by semantic similarity. Searching for a particular scene in the array-a common task in reactive and proactive surveillance-was faster when scenes were arranged by semantic category. This effect was found only when scenes were separated by gaps for participants who were not made aware that scenes in the multiplex were grouped by semantics (Experiment 1), but irrespective of whether scenes were separated by gaps or not for participants who were made aware of this grouping (Experiment 2). When target frequency varied between scene categories-mirroring unequal distributions of crime over space-the benefit of organising scenes by semantic category was enhanced for scenes in the most frequently searched-for category, without any statistical evidence for a cost when searching for rarely searched-for categories (Experiment 3). The findings extend current understanding of the role of within-scene semantics in visual search, to encompass between-scene semantic relationships. Furthermore, the findings suggest that arranging scenes in the CCTV control room by semantic category is likely to assist operators in finding specific scenes during surveillance.
闭路电视在公共安全、健康和安全方面发挥着重要作用。监控大量闭路电视摄像机的画面是一项视觉和认知要求都很高的任务。将监控环境中的场景按地理接近度排列，以减少这种需求，已被推荐用于减少这种需求，但对这种方法的实证测试并未发现任何好处。本研究测试了一种基于文献中关于视觉搜索和场景感知的心理原理的替代场景排列方法：按语义相似性对场景进行分组。在反应性和主动性监控中，在数组中搜索特定场景是一项常见任务，按语义类别排列场景可以更快地搜索到目标。当参与者不知道多路复用中的场景按语义分组时（实验 1），只有当场景之间有间隔时，才会发现这种效果，但当参与者知道这种分组时，无论场景之间是否有间隔（实验 2），这种效果都会出现。当目标频率在场景类别之间变化时——反映了犯罪在空间上的分布不均——按语义类别组织场景的好处会增强对最常搜索场景类别的搜索，而在搜索不太常搜索的场景类别时没有任何统计证据表明存在成本（实验 3）。这些发现扩展了当前对场景内语义在视觉搜索中的作用的理解，涵盖了场景之间的语义关系。此外，这些发现表明，在闭路电视控制室中按语义类别排列场景可能有助于操作员在监控期间找到特定场景。
