Video surveillance systems have long been in use to monitor security sensitive areas. The history of video surveillance consists of three generations of systems which are called 1GSS, 2GSS and 3GSS.

The first generation surveillance systems (1GSS, 1960-1980) were based on analog sub systems for image acquisition, transmission and processing. They extended human eye in spatial sense by transmitting the outputs of several cameras monitoring a set of sites to the displays in a central control room. They had the major drawbacks like requiring high bandwidth, difficult archiving and retrieval of events due to large number of video tape requirements and difficult online event detection which only depended on human operators with limited attention span.