A smart camera approach to real-time tracking

Tracking applications using distributed sensor networks are emerging today, both in the field of surveillance (airports, train stations, museums, public spots) and industrial vision (visual servoing, factory automation). Traditional centralized approaches offer several drawbacks, due to limited communication bandwidth, computational requirements and thus also limited spatial camera resolution and framerate. In this paper we present a network-enabled Smart Camera for probabilistic tracking. It is capable of tracking objects in real-time and offers a very bandwidth-conservative approach, as it only transmits the tracking results which are on a higher level of abstraction.