Video surveillance cameras generate most of recorded video, and there is far more recorded video than operators can watch. Much progress has recently been made using summarization of recorded video, but such techniques do not have much impact on live video surveillance. We assume a camera hierarchy where a Master camera observes the decision-critical region, and one or more Slave cameras observe regions where past activity is important for making the current decision. We propose that when people appear in the live Master camera, the Slave cameras will display their past activities, and the operator could use past information for real-time decision making. The basic units of our method are action tubes, representing objects and their trajectories over time. Our object-based method has advantages over frame based methods, as it can handle multiple people, multiple activities for each person, and can address re-identification uncertainty.
Representation of the video from non-overlapping cameras has received little attention, a notable exception is @cite_14 , which projects multiple video cameras on a 3D model of the environment. But such a 3D model is not generally available. Another interesting work has been done by @cite_15 , who have recognized the importance of using objects for highlighting relationships between video streams from multiple cameras. Their work however has concentrated on the extraction and indexing of objects rather than on visual representation.
@cite_15 @cite_14
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We propose a novel approach to understanding activities from their partial observations monitored through multiple non-overlapping cameras separated by unknown time gaps. In our approach, each camera view is first decomposed automatically into regions based on the correlation of object dynamics across different spatial locations in all camera views. A new Cross Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is then formulated to discover and quantify the time delayed correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views in a single common reference space. We show that learning the time delayed activity correlations offers important contextual information for (i) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network; (ii) robust person re-identification and (iii) global activity interpretation and video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in contrast to conventional methods, our approach does not rely on either intra-camera or inter-camera object tracking; it thus can be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featured with severe inter-object occlusions. The effectiveness and robustness of our approach are demonstrated through experiments on 330 hours of videos captured from 17 cameras installed at two busy underground stations with complex and diverse scenes. Tracking across cameras with non-overlapping views is a challenging problem. Firstly, the observations of an object are often widely separated in time and space when viewed from non-overlapping cameras. Secondly, the appearance of an object in one camera view might be very different from its appearance in another camera view due to the differences in illumination, pose and camera properties. To deal with the first problem, we observe that people or vehicles tend to follow the same paths in most cases, i.e., roads, walkways, corridors etc. The proposed algorithm uses this conformity in the traversed paths to establish correspondence. The algorithm learns this conformity and hence the inter-camera relationships in the form of multivariate probability density of space-time variables (entry and exit locations, velocities, and transition times) using kernel density estimation. To handle the appearance change of an object as it moves from one camera to another, we show that all brightness transfer functions from a given camera to another camera lie in a low dimensional subspace. This subspace is learned by using probabilistic principal component analysis and used for appearance matching. The proposed approach does not require explicit inter-camera calibration, rather the system learns the camera topology and subspace of inter-camera brightness transfer functions during a training phase. Once the training is complete, correspondences are assigned using the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation framework using both location and appearance cues. Experiments with real world videos are reported which validate the proposed approach. This paper presents a novel and robust approach to consistent labeling for people surveillance in multicamera systems. A general framework scalable to any number of cameras with overlapped views is devised. An offline training process automatically computes ground-plane homography and recovers epipolar geometry. When a new object is detected in any one camera, hypotheses for potential matching objects in the other cameras are established. Each of the hypotheses is evaluated using a prior and likelihood value. The prior accounts for the positions of the potential matching objects, while the likelihood is computed by warping the vertical axis of the new object on the field of view of the other cameras and measuring the amount of match. In the likelihood, two contributions (forward and backward) are considered so as to correctly handle the case of groups of people merged into single objects. Eventually, a maximum-a-posteriori approach estimates the best label assignment for the new object. Comparisons with other methods based on homography and extensive outdoor experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is accurate and robust in coping with segmentation errors and in disambiguating groups. We present a novel framework for robustly delivering video data from distributed wireless camera networks that are characterized by packet drops. The main focus in this work is on robustness which is imminently needed in a wireless setting. We propose two alternative models to capture interview correlation among cameras with overlapping views. The view-synthesis-based correlation model requires at least two other camera views and relies on both disparity estimation and view interpolation. The disparity-based correlation model requires only one other camera view and makes use of epipolar geometry. With the proposed models, we show how interview correlation can be exploited for robustness through the use of distributed source coding. The proposed approach has low encoding complexity, is robust while satisfying tight latency constraints and requires no intercamera communication. Our experiments show that on bursty packet erasure channels, the proposed H.263+1 based method outperforms baseline methods such as H.263+ with forward error correction and H.263+ with intra refresh by up to 2.5 dB. Empirical results further support the relative insensitivity of our proposed approach to the number of additional available camera views or their placement density.