A Flexible Surveillance System Architecture

Traditional multimedia surveillance systems are task specific and tightly coupled to the environment. Moreover, system designs generally start with the assumption that the environment, context, and sensors always remain static. With such a tight coupling, it becomes very difficult to port the system to new environments. Furthermore, for most of the systems, there is no straightforward way to upgrade the existing system to incorporate technological advancements such as new sensors or novel feature extraction techniques. We propose a flexible surveillance system architecture which can be easily ported in different environments, is dynamic without any significant compromise in system performance, and can be extended to integrate newer technological developments. We also introduce the notion of environment model (EM), which completely defines the coupling between system and the physical environment. The isolation of environment specific variables in EM makes the system easily portable in different environments. We present results of a prototype implementation of the system that highlights our design goals.