Surveillance Centric Coding

In this paper we introduce the paradigm of Surveillance Centric Coding (SCC), in which coding aims to achieve bit-rate optimisation and adaptation of surveillance videos for storing and transmission purposes. In the proposed approach the SCC encoder communicates with Video Content Analysis (VCA) module that detects events of interests in video captured by CCTV. Bit-rate optimization and adaptation is achieved by exploiting the scalability properties of the employed codec. Time segments containing events relevant to surveillance application are encoded using high spatio-temporal resolution and quality while the irrelevant portions from the surveillance standpoint are encoded at low spatio-temporal resolution and / or quality. Thanks to the scalability of the produced compressed bit-stream, additional bit-rate adaptation is possible, for instance for the transmission purposes. Experimental evaluation shows that significant reduction in bit-rate can be achieved by the proposed approach without loss of information relevant to surveillance applications.