Visual intent recognition in a multiple camera environment

Activity recognition is an active field of research with many applications for both industrial and home use. Industry might use it as part of a security surveillance system, while home uses could be in applications such as smart rooms and aids for the disabled. This thesis develops one component of a “smart system” that can recognize certain activities related to the subject’s intent, i.e. where subjects concentrate their attention. A visual intent activity recognition system that operates in near real-time is created, based on multiple cameras. To accomplish this, a combination of face detection, facial feature detection, and pose estimation is used to estimate each subject’s gaze direction. To allow for better detection of the subject’s facial features, and thus more robust pose estimation, a multiple camera system is used. A wide-view camera is zoomed out and finds the subject, while a narrow-view camera zooms in to get more details on the face. Neural networks are then used to locate the mouth and eyes. A triangle template is matched to these features and used to estimate the subject’s pose in real-time. This method is used to determine where the subjects are looking and detect the activity of looking intently at a given location. A four-camera system recognizes the activity as occurring when at least one of two subjects is looking at the other. Testing showed that, on average, the pose estimate was accurate to within 5.08 degrees. The visual intent activity recognition system was able to correctly determine when one subject was looking at the other over 95% of the time

Motion Detection and Face Recognition for CCTV Surveillance System

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) is currently used in daily life for a variety purpose. Development of the use of CCTV has transformed from a simple passive surveillance into an integrated intelligent control system. In this research, motion detection and facial recognation in CCTV video is done to be a base for decision making to produce automated, effective and efficient integrated system. This CCTV video processing provides three outputs, a motion detection information, a face detection information and a face identification information. Accumulative Differences Images (ADI) used  for motion detection, and Haar Classifiers Cascade used  for facial segmentation. Feature extraction is done with Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The features was trained by Counter-Propagation Network (CPN). Offline tests performed on 45 CCTV video. The test results obtained a motion detection success rate of 92,655%, a face detection success rate of 76%, and a face detection success rate of 60%. The results concluded that the process of faces identification through CCTV video with natural background have not been able to obtain optimal results. The motion detection process is ideal to be applied to real-time conditions. But in combination with face recognition process, there is a significant delay time

On using gait to enhance frontal face extraction

Visual surveillance finds increasing deployment formonitoring urban environments. Operators need to be able to determine identity from surveillance images and often use face recognition for this purpose. In surveillance environments, it is necessary to handle pose variation of the human head, low frame rate, and low resolution input images. We describe the first use of gait to enable face acquisition and recognition, by analysis of 3-D head motion and gait trajectory, with super-resolution analysis. We use region- and distance-based refinement of head pose estimation. We develop a direct mapping to relate the 2-D image with a 3-D model. In gait trajectory analysis, we model the looming effect so as to obtain the correct face region. Based on head position and the gait trajectory, we can reconstruct high-quality frontal face images which are demonstrated to be suitable for face recognition. The contributions of this research include the construction of a 3-D model for pose estimation from planar imagery and the first use of gait information to enhance the face extraction process allowing for deployment in surveillance scenario

Binary object recognition system on FPGA with bSOM

Tri-state Self Organizing Map (bSOM), which takes binary inputs and maintains tri-state weights, has been used for classification rather than clustering in this paper. The major contribution here is the demonstration of the potential use of the modified bSOM in security surveillance, as a recognition system on FPGA

A distributed camera system for multi-resolution surveillance

We describe an architecture for a multi-camera, multi-resolution surveillance system. The aim is to support a set of distributed static and pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras and visual tracking algorithms, together with a central supervisor unit. Each camera (and possibly pan-tilt device) has a dedicated process and processor. Asynchronous interprocess communications and archiving of data are achieved in a simple and effective way via a central repository, implemented using an SQL database. Visual tracking data from static views are stored dynamically into tables in the database via client calls to the SQL server. A supervisor process running on the SQL server determines if active zoom cameras should be dispatched to observe a particular target, and this message is effected via writing demands into another database table. We show results from a real implementation of the system comprising one static camera overviewing the environment under consideration and a PTZ camera operating under closed-loop velocity control, which uses a fast and robust level-set-based region tracker. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its feasibility to multi-camera systems for intelligent surveillance