A System for Video Surveillance and Monitoring

The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Sarnoff Corporation are developing a system for autonomous Video Surveillance and Monitoring. The technical objective is to use multiple, cooperative video sensors to provide continuous coverage of people and vehicles in cluttered environments. This paper presents an overview of the system and significant results achieved to date. 1 Introduction The DARPA Image Understanding (IU) program is funding basic research in the area of Video Surveillance and Monitoring (VSAM) to provide battlefield awareness. The thrust of CMU's VSAM research is to develop automated video understanding algorithms that allow a network of active video sensors to automatically monitor objects and events within a complex, urban environment. We have developed video understanding technology that can automatically detect and track multiple people and vehicles within cluttered scenes, and to monitor their activities over long periods of time. Human an...