Real-Time Active Tampering Detection of Surveillance Camera and Implementation on Digital Signal Processor

Active and automatic camera tampering detection is more and more important, especially for wide area surveillance systems with large amount of video cameras installed. Generally, a camera functions for video recording and lacks the ability to detect whether tampering has occurred. Most tampering solutions are passive, as evidenced by many surveillance systems frequently left unattended. Tampering detection of real-time automated cameras is thus of priority concern important for timely operator warning. This work describes a novel algorithm for camera tamper detection scheme. Developed for video surveillance and security applications, the pro-posed approach identifies camera tampering by detecting large edge differences and grayscale histogram comparisons between current and previous frames. The optimized algorithm is implemented on PC and TI DAVINCI DM6437 DSP as well. Extensive experiments were performed. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can detect various tampering cases. The overall recognition performance was 94%.