Functionality Delegation in Distributed Surveillance Systems

The utilization of multimedia devices is growing rapidly in surveillance and monitoring applications. These multimedia surveillance systems need to process large amounts of multimodal sensor data in order to detect events and objects. While processing this large amount of data, the system faces many processing and network bottlenecks. The design of efficient multimedia surveillance system requires intelligent architectural decisions and performance evaluation to cope with these resource demands. One critical issue among all these architectures is task assignment among processing units. To study the effect of this task assignment on system performance with quantifiable performance measures is very useful and challenging. We define a Functionality Delegation Coefficient which abstracts the delegation of functionality among processing units of a distributed surveillance system and show its effect on event blocking probability and response time. Simulation and real implementation results are provided to validate the model.