The present embodiments relate to video analytics. In particular, configuration of multiple cameras is provided for video analytics.
In order to meet the increasing needs of the security and safety, surveillance systems are becoming more complex. Besides the basic capabilities of video surveillance, such as recording and playback, video analytics technologies are used to enrich the functionality. A person or vehicle may be detected and tracked, events may be detected, an alarm may be triggered, and/or forensic searching may be provided.
In order to achieve accurate performance in terms of detection and false alarm rate, every camera needs to be configured properly. The camera configuration task varies based on the different functionalities. Camera configuration is time consuming. For example, a tunnel monitoring system monitors traffic flow and generates events, such as slow vehicle, stopped vehicle, traffic jam, wrong directional driver, and pedestrian detection. An experienced worker may need about eight minutes to configure a camera, during which the worker may click the mouse buttons more than 100 times. With forty cameras for every mile inside the tunnel, 5.5 hours and 4000 mouse clicks are needed to configure the cameras for every mile.
For indoor people detection and tracking functionalities, configuration tools are typically provided for a single camera. As a person travels from the field of view of one camera to the field of view of another camera, the person is re-identified. The facial recognition or other detection is performed again. To configure a typical site with 40 cameras, a worker may click 120 times to define camera positions and more than 150-600 times overall to define the calibration planes for all of the cameras.