Advisor-socket and see: lessons learnt in building a real-time distributed surveillance system

We describe the evolution of the ADVISOR intelligent surveillance system architecture from a scalable and extensible 'paper-design' in the original funding proposal, through prototyping using TAO CORBA naming and A/V streaming services, and on to a working demonstration system that was tested live at Barcelona's TMB metro. The benefits of using a real-time, distributed, concurrent architecture design methodology such as MASCOT are discussed. It then describes recent developments in optimising the system to use sockets directly, to work on single or multiple remote hosts. Developing an 'ideal' CORBA-based architecture that is self-configuring, robust and self-repairing is discussed. Finally, lessons learnt in integrating a large-scale distributed vision system (both in the sense of processes and research team locations) are presented.