Operator attention based video surveillance

We introduce a surveillance video tractability adjustment system that employs a dynamic operator attention model. The tractability of the surveillance video is adjusted according to the instantaneous attention level of the operator (Fig.1). Our system has two novel major parts: (i) dynamic measurement of the operator attention levels and (ii) an online video tractability adjustment system that employs measured attention levels. We estimate the attention levels of the operators by measuring the blink rates and the saccade information of the eyes. Using well known theories from human psychology, we estimate the amount of video tractability that the operator can easily handle. We tested the proposed system on volunteer operators using both synthetic and real surveillance data. The results are very promising and we plan to extend the system with multiple operators and multiple video streams. Supplementary material is available at the project website.