VASC Seminar Announcement
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Date: Friday, 5/11/01
Time: 1:00-2:00
Place: NSH 3002

Speaker: Lucio Marcenaro, University of Genoa
Title: Distributed architectures and logical task decomposition
       in multimedia surveillance systems

Abstract:
In the last few years, the development of complex surveillance systems has
captured the interest of both the research and industrial worlds. Strong and
challenging requirements of the modern society are involved in this problem,
which aims to increase safety and security in several application domains
such as transport, tourism, home and bank security, military applications,
etc. At the same time, fast improvements in microelectronics,
telecommunications and computer science makes it necessary to consider new
perspectives in this field. The first part of the talk will show several
aspects of image processing for video-surveillance that have been
investigated by the ISIP40 group in the Department of Biophysical and
Electronic Engineering of the University of Genoa. In the second part, the
impact of distributed processing on multimedia surveillance systems, which
represent the so-called third-generation surveillance systems (3GSSs), will
be investigated, discussed and evaluated. In particular, aspects related to
the distribution of intelligence over multiple-processing and wide-bandwidth
resources will be discussed in detail. It will be shown how distribution of
intelligence can be obtained by a hierarchical architecture that partitions
in a dynamic way the main logical processing tasks (i.e., representation,
recognition and communication) performed in a 3GSS physical architecture
made up of intelligent cameras, hubs and central control rooms. The
advantages of this solution are pointed out in terms of: (a) increased
flexibility and re-configurability; (b) optimal allocation of available
processing and bandwidth resources. A case study will be analyzed that
allows one to gain a deeper insight into a distributed surveillance system.