A high resolution smart camera with GigE Vision extension for surveillance applications

Intelligent video surveillance is currently a hot topic in computer vision research. The goal of intelligent video surveillance is to process the captured video from the monitored area, extract specific information and take appropriate action based on that information. Due to the high computational complexity of vision tasks and the real-time nature of these systems, current software-based intelligent video surveillance systems are unable to perform sophisticated operations. Smart cameras are a key component for future intelligent surveillance systems. They use embedded processing to offload computationally intensive vision tasks from the host processing computers and increasingly reduce the required communication bandwidth and data flows over the network. This paper reports on the design of a high resolution smart camera with a GigE vision extension for automated video surveillance systems. The features of the new camera interface standard, GigE Vision will be introduced and its suitability for video surveillance systems will be described. The surveillance framework for which the GigE vision standard has been developed is presented as well as a brief overview of the proposed smart camera.