Recently, the prevention of crime using CCTV draws special in accordance with the higher crime incidence rate. Therefore security systems like a CCTV with audio capability are developing for giving an instant alarm. This paper proposes a scream detecting engine from various ambient noises in real environment for surveillance systems. The proposed engine detects scream signals among the various ambient noises using the features extracted in time/frequency domain. The experimental result shows the performance of our engine is very promising in comparison with the traditional engines using the model based features like LPC, LPCC and MFCC. The proposed method has a low computational complexity by using FFT and cross correlation coefficients instead of extracting complex features like LPC, LPCC and MFCC. Therefore the proposed engine can be efficient for audio-based surveillance systems with low SNRs in real field.