Attentive monitoring of multiple video streams driven by a Bayesian foraging strategy

In this paper we shall consider the problem of deploying attention to 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 multi-stream 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 Dataset, a publicly available dataset, are presented to illustrate the utility of the proposed technique.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processin

Cognitive visual tracking and camera control

Cognitive visual tracking is the process of observing and understanding the behaviour of a moving person. This paper presents an efficient solution to extract, in real-time, high-level information from an observed scene, and generate the most appropriate commands for a set of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras in a surveillance scenario. Such a high-level feedback control loop, which is the main novelty of our work, will serve to reduce uncertainties in the observed scene and to maximize the amount of information extracted from it. It is implemented with a distributed camera system using SQL tables as virtual communication channels, and Situation Graph Trees for knowledge representation, inference and high-level camera control. A set of experiments in a surveillance scenario show the effectiveness of our approach and its potential for real applications of cognitive vision

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

Adaptive-Rate Compressive Sensing Using Side Information

We provide two novel adaptive-rate compressive sensing (CS) strategies for sparse, time-varying signals using side information. Our first method utilizes extra cross-validation measurements, and the second one exploits extra low-resolution measurements. Unlike the majority of current CS techniques, we do not assume that we know an upper bound on the number of significant coefficients that comprise the images in the video sequence. Instead, we use the side information to predict the number of significant coefficients in the signal at the next time instant. For each image in the video sequence, our techniques specify a fixed number of spatially-multiplexed CS measurements to acquire, and adjust this quantity from image to image. Our strategies are developed in the specific context of background subtraction for surveillance video, and we experimentally validate the proposed methods on real video sequences