An Inexpensive Upgradation of Legacy Cameras Using Software and Hardware Architecture for Monitoring and Tracking of Live Threats

Abstract

Surveillance through digital cameras is increasing exponentially. A majority of these cameras are not smart cameras; therefore, they send their video stream to a central server where it is processed and analyzed for any threats. Typically, human operators or machine learning algorithms at the cloud analyzed and processed the post-event videos to track and locate the perpetrator or victim. The centralized approach leads to two primary shortcomings: 1) the high cost of cloud infrastructure; 2) lack of instant tracking and detection of the threat. One solution is to replace these legacy cameras with the smart cameras so they can process information locally. Although the solution is costly, it could solve the real-time threat detection issues. However, the need for a central server remains there, to construct the path of threat, when threat moves from one camera view to another. The existing distributed architectures for threat tracking shifts the load of threat capturing and processing from a central server to the edge nodes, which in turn reduces the computational power but does not remove the role of the central server completely. These architectures don’t equip each camera of processing and communicating with each other. Further, in the existing distributed architectures, the local cameras are not able to store the path of the threat individually and just transmit the captured trajectory to the central body. This research proposed a second alternative that makes use of legacy cameras through additional hardware and software components such that they can process information and collaborate locally. The research addresses the challenge by introducing a low cost distributed threat tracking framework that allows the single camera to identify the threat and communicate its information to other cameras without involving the central server. The framework stores the information in a lightweight architecture that is inspired by the blockchain storage algorithm. The system also allows querying the path traveled by the threat at any stage. To evaluate the system, we performed two simulated experiments: one with a central server and another with the proposed distributed system. The results of the experiments showed that the time to track the threat through the proposed system was lower than the existing centralized system. Moreover, the proposed system predicted the paths of threats with an accuracy of 85.49%. In the future, the technique may be improved with reinforcement learning and other machine learning techniques.