Computer vision system for in-house video surveillance

In-house video surveillance to control the safety of people living in domestic environments is considered. In this context, common problems and general purpose computer vision techniques are discussed and implemented in an integrated solution comprising a robust moving object detection module which is able to disregard shadows, a tracking module designed to handle large occlusions, and a posture detector. These factors, shadows, large occlusions and people´s posture, are the key problems that are encountered with in-house surveillance systems. A distributed system with cameras installed in each room of a house can be used to provide full coverage of people´s movements. Tracking is based on a probabilistic approach in which the appearance and probability of occlusions are computed for the current camera and warped in the next camera´s view by positioning the cameras to disambiguate the occlusions. The application context is the emerging area of domotics (from the Latin word domus, meaning ´home´, and informatics). In particular, indoor video surveillance, which makes it possible for elderly and disabled people to live with a sufficient degree of autonomy, via interaction with this new technology, which can be distributed in a house at affordable costs and with high reliability.