A comprehensive survey of multi-view video summarization

[EN] There has been an exponential growth in the amount of visual data on a daily basis acquired from single or multi-view surveillance camera networks. This massive amount of data requires efficient mechanisms such as video summarization to ensure that only significant data are reported and the redundancy is reduced. Multi-view video summarization (MVS) is a less redundant and more concise way of providing information from the video content of all the cameras in the form of either keyframes or video segments. This paper presents an overview of the existing strategies proposed for MVS, including their advantages and drawbacks. Our survey covers the genericsteps in MVS, such as the pre-processing of video data, feature extraction, and post-processing followed by summary generation. We also describe the datasets that are available for the evaluation of MVS. Finally, we examine the major current issues related to MVS and put forward the recommendations for future research(1). (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2019R1A2B5B01070067)Hussain, T.; Muhammad, K.; Ding, W.; Lloret, J.; Baik, SW.; De Albuquerque, VHC. (2021). A comprehensive survey of multi-view video summarization. Pattern Recognition. 109:1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2020.10756711510

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

Collaborative Multi-Agent Video Fast-Forwarding

Multi-agent applications have recently gained significant popularity. In many computer vision tasks, a network of agents, such as a team of robots with cameras, could work collaboratively to perceive the environment for efficient and accurate situation awareness. However, these agents often have limited computation, communication, and storage resources. Thus, reducing resource consumption while still providing an accurate perception of the environment becomes an important goal when deploying multi-agent systems. To achieve this goal, we identify and leverage the overlap among different camera views in multi-agent systems for reducing the processing, transmission and storage of redundant/unimportant video frames. Specifically, we have developed two collaborative multi-agent video fast-forwarding frameworks in distributed and centralized settings, respectively. In these frameworks, each individual agent can selectively process or skip video frames at adjustable paces based on multiple strategies via reinforcement learning. Multiple agents then collaboratively sense the environment via either 1) a consensus-based distributed framework called DMVF that periodically updates the fast-forwarding strategies of agents by establishing communication and consensus among connected neighbors, or 2) a centralized framework called MFFNet that utilizes a central controller to decide the fast-forwarding strategies for agents based on collected data. We demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed frameworks on a real-world surveillance video dataset VideoWeb and a new simulated driving dataset CarlaSim, through extensive simulations and deployment on an embedded platform with TCP communication. We show that compared with other approaches in the literature, our frameworks achieve better coverage of important frames, while significantly reducing the number of frames processed at each agent.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.0443