Multi-tasking smart cameras for intelligent video surveillance systems

We demonstrate a video surveillance system- comprising passive and active pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) cameras-that intelligently responds to scene complexity, automatically capturing higher resolution video when there are fewer people in the scene and capturing lower resolution video as the number of pedestrians present in the scene increases. To this end, we have developed behavior based-controllers for passive and active cameras, enabling these cameras to carry out multiple observation tasks simultaneously. The research presented herein is a step towards video surveillance systems-consisting of a heterogeneous set of sensors-that provide persistent coverage of large spaces, while optimizing surveillance data collection by tuning the sensing parameters of individual sensors (in a distributed manner) in response to scene activity.