Surveillance Systems for Smart Homes: A Comparative Survey

As the number of older Americans increases and many decide to stay in their homes, the need for assistive technologies grows. One such technology is an intelligent system of surveillance cameras. While these systems can provide many services, we attempted to limit ourselves to the evaluation of systems that use cameras to track the locations of objects that may be lost or misplaced within a home. We provide a comparison of the systems that are currently in operation or are being developed and suggest areas where enhancements may produce systems that are more effective. Because few systems exist for the sole purpose of tracking objects in a home, we also evaluate systems that are designed to use multiple cameras to perform general surveillance. We go on to show where some principles of these system can be adapted to improve the performance in the task of tracking objects within a home.