City Sentinel: A Unified AI-Based Smart Surveillance Framework for Real-Time Multi-Threat Detection Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Rapid urbanization has increased the need for surveillance systems that can monitor multiple public safety risks at the same time. Traditional systems often use separate solutions for facial recognition, vehicle identification, fire detection, and behavioral analysis, resulting in fragmented infrastructure and multiple interfaces for operators to manage. This paper presents City Sentinel, a unified AI-based surveillance framework that integrates six detection capabilities into one scalable platform: facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), fire and smoke detection, weapon and knife detection, violence detection, and road accident detection. The system combines a Next.js operator dashboard, FastAPI backend, cloud-based PostgreSQL event storage, InsightFace and YOLOv8 vision models, and EasyOCR for plate recognition. Camera streams are processed through dedicated inference workers using RTSP. On a workstation equipped with an NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU, the system achieves a median end-to-end latency of 743 ms and supports four concurrent RTSP streams within a two-second latency limit. It achieves a 91.2% face-match rate, 85.7% plate-reading accuracy, and mAP@0.5 scores of 0.846 to 0.889 across the fire, knife, and weapon detection modules. In user-acceptance testing, operators could enroll a new identity in under one minute and identify a flagged person from live footage in an average of 12 seconds. The results demonstrate that a modular, open-source, multi-model architecture can provide broad surveillance coverage, cloud-based auditability, and flexibility for adding new detection capabilities while maintaining practical real-time performance.