In spite of the development of various media sensors, multimedia (and computer vision) researchers have mostly adopted a video-centric approach to solve the automated surveillance and monitoring related problems. We look at the monitoring/surveillance problem from an information-centric perspective and advocate the use of diverse sources of information which enables the use of multiple correlated media. We advocate a design methodology for building systems which can explicitly take performance into account. We then propose that the surveillance problem can be better posed as an "information-search" problem in which the user can query for the information of his/her interest.

We will present a framework for multimedia monitoring that uses a domain-data transformation model based approach to map domain-events to their equivalent data-events. We will motivate the new approach, present the architecture and highlight the information assimilation aspects. We will also present some open problems and issues arising from the novel way of looking at monitoring.