2,363 research outputs found
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
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
Reproducible Evaluation of Pan-Tilt-Zoom Tracking
Tracking with a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera has been a research topic in
computer vision for many years. However, it is very difficult to assess the
progress that has been made on this topic because there is no standard
evaluation methodology. The difficulty in evaluating PTZ tracking algorithms
arises from their dynamic nature. In contrast to other forms of tracking, PTZ
tracking involves both locating the target in the image and controlling the
motors of the camera to aim it so that the target stays in its field of view.
This type of tracking can only be performed online. In this paper, we propose a
new evaluation framework based on a virtual PTZ camera. With this framework,
tracking scenarios do not change for each experiment and we are able to
replicate online PTZ camera control and behavior including camera positioning
delays, tracker processing delays, and numerical zoom. We tested our evaluation
framework with the Camshift tracker to show its viability and to establish
baseline results.Comment: This is an extended version of the 2015 ICIP paper "Reproducible
Evaluation of Pan-Tilt-Zoom Tracking
Real-Time, Multiple Pan/Tilt/Zoom Computer Vision Tracking and 3D Positioning System for Unmanned Aerial System Metrology
The study of structural characteristics of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) continues to be an important field of research for developing state of the art nano/micro systems. Development of a metrology system using computer vision (CV) tracking and 3D point extraction would provide an avenue for making these theoretical developments. This work provides a portable, scalable system capable of real-time tracking, zooming, and 3D position estimation of a UAS using multiple cameras. Current state-of-the-art photogrammetry systems use retro-reflective markers or single point lasers to obtain object poses and/or positions over time. Using a CV pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) system has the potential to circumvent their limitations. The system developed in this paper exploits parallel-processing and the GPU for CV-tracking, using optical flow and known camera motion, in order to capture a moving object using two PTU cameras. The parallel-processing technique developed in this work is versatile, allowing the ability to test other CV methods with a PTZ system using known camera motion. Utilizing known camera poses, the object\u27s 3D position is estimated and focal lengths are estimated for filling the image to a desired amount. This system is tested against truth data obtained using an industrial system
WATCHING PEOPLE: ALGORITHMS TO STUDY HUMAN MOTION AND ACTIVITIES
Nowadays human motion analysis is one of the most active research topics in Computer Vision and it is receiving an increasing attention from both the industrial and scientific communities.
The growing interest in human motion analysis is motivated by the increasing number of promising applications, ranging from surveillance, human–computer interaction, virtual reality to healthcare, sports, computer games and video conferencing, just to name a few.
The aim of this thesis is to give an overview of the various tasks involved in visual motion analysis of the human body and to present the issues and possible solutions related to it.
In this thesis, visual motion analysis is categorized into three major areas related to the interpretation of human motion: tracking of human motion using virtual pan-tilt-zoom (vPTZ) camera, recognition of human motions and human behaviors segmentation.
In the field of human motion tracking, a virtual environment for PTZ cameras (vPTZ) is presented to overcame the mechanical limitations of PTZ cameras. The vPTZ is built on equirectangular images acquired by 360° cameras and it allows not only the development of pedestrian tracking algorithms but also the comparison of their performances. On the basis of this virtual environment, three novel pedestrian tracking algorithms for 360° cameras were developed, two of which adopt a tracking-by-detection approach while the last adopts a Bayesian approach.
The action recognition problem is addressed by an algorithm that represents actions in terms of multinomial distributions of frequent sequential patterns of different length. Frequent sequential patterns are series of data descriptors that occur many times in the data. The proposed method learns a codebook of frequent sequential patterns by means of an apriori-like algorithm. An action is then represented with a Bag-of-Frequent-Sequential-Patterns approach.
In the last part of this thesis a methodology to semi-automatically annotate behavioral data given a small set of manually annotated data is presented. The resulting methodology is not only effective in the semi-automated annotation task but can also be used in presence of abnormal behaviors, as demonstrated empirically by testing the system on data collected from children affected by neuro-developmental disorders
Eagle: End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning based Autonomous Control of PTZ Cameras
Existing approaches for autonomous control of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras use
multiple stages where object detection and localization are performed
separately from the control of the PTZ mechanisms. These approaches require
manual labels and suffer from performance bottlenecks due to error propagation
across the multi-stage flow of information. The large size of object detection
neural networks also makes prior solutions infeasible for real-time deployment
in resource-constrained devices. We present an end-to-end deep reinforcement
learning (RL) solution called Eagle to train a neural network policy that
directly takes images as input to control the PTZ camera. Training
reinforcement learning is cumbersome in the real world due to labeling effort,
runtime environment stochasticity, and fragile experimental setups. We
introduce a photo-realistic simulation framework for training and evaluation of
PTZ camera control policies. Eagle achieves superior camera control performance
by maintaining the object of interest close to the center of captured images at
high resolution and has up to 17% more tracking duration than the
state-of-the-art. Eagle policies are lightweight (90x fewer parameters than
Yolo5s) and can run on embedded camera platforms such as Raspberry PI (33 FPS)
and Jetson Nano (38 FPS), facilitating real-time PTZ tracking for
resource-constrained environments. With domain randomization, Eagle policies
trained in our simulator can be transferred directly to real-world scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, IoTD
Hybrid Focal Stereo Networks for Pattern Analysis in Homogeneous Scenes
In this paper we address the problem of multiple camera calibration in the
presence of a homogeneous scene, and without the possibility of employing
calibration object based methods. The proposed solution exploits salient
features present in a larger field of view, but instead of employing active
vision we replace the cameras with stereo rigs featuring a long focal analysis
camera, as well as a short focal registration camera. Thus, we are able to
propose an accurate solution which does not require intrinsic variation models
as in the case of zooming cameras. Moreover, the availability of the two views
simultaneously in each rig allows for pose re-estimation between rigs as often
as necessary. The algorithm has been successfully validated in an indoor
setting, as well as on a difficult scene featuring a highly dense pilgrim crowd
in Makkah.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Machine Vision and Application
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