OVVV: Using Virtual Worlds to Design and Evaluate Surveillance Systems

Object video virtual video (OVVV) is a publicly available visual surveillance simulation test bed based on a commercial game engine. The tool simulates multiple synchronized video streams from a variety of camera configurations, including static, PTZ and omni-directional cameras, in a virtual environment populated with computer or player controlled humans and vehicles. To support performance evaluation, OVVV generates detailed automatic ground truth for each frame including target centroids, bounding boxes and pixel-wise foreground segmentation. We describe several realistic, controllable noise effects including pixel noise, video ghosting and radial distortion to improve the realism of synthetic video and provide additional dimensions for performance testing. Several indoor and outdoor virtual environments developed by the authors are described to illustrate the range of testing scenarios possible using OVVV. Finally, we provide a practical demonstration of using OVVV to develop and evaluate surveillance algorithms.