Attentive Monitoring of Multiple Video Streams Driven by a Bayesian Foraging Strategy

In this paper, we shall consider the problem of deploying attention to the subsets of the video streams for collating the most relevant data and information of interest related to a given task. We formalize this monitoring problem as a foraging problem. We propose a probabilistic framework to model observer's attentive behavior as the behavior of a forager. The forager, moment to moment, focuses its attention on the most informative stream/camera, detects interesting objects or activities, or switches to a more profitable stream. The approach proposed here is suitable to be exploited for multistream video summarization. Meanwhile, it can serve as a preliminary step for more sophisticated video surveillance, e.g., activity and behavior analysis. Experimental results achieved on the UCR Videoweb Activities Data Set, a publicly available data set, are presented to illustrate the utility of the proposed technique.