Design, analysis, and engineering of video monitoring systems: an approach and a case study

Rapid improvement in computing power, cheap sensing, and more flexible algorithms are facilitating increased development of real-time video surveillance and monitoring systems. The deployment of video understanding systems in certain critical applications in the real world can be done only if performance guarantees can be provided for these systems. This paper reviews past work on a systematic engineering methodology for vision systems performance characterization and illustrates how it can be adapted in practice to develop a real-time people detection and zooming system to meet given application requirements. A case study involving dual-camera real-time video surveillance is used to illustrate that by judiciously choosing the system modules and by performing a careful analysis of the influence of various tuning parameters on the system it is possible to perform proper statistical inference, to automatically set control parameters and to quantify performance limits.