H.264-based Wireless Surveillance Sensors in Application to Target Identification and Tracking

Abstract

In this paper, the author propose a hardware-based m icro structure inside the architecture of H.264 encoder, called Vector Bank (VB), which can dram atically reduce the bandwidth, mem ory, and com putation tim e of a multi-cam era video surveillance system . VB is a m em ory-based structure that contains the vector inform ation for every single Macro Block (MB) of the video fram e from the Motion Estim ation m odule of the H.264 encoder. After extraction of the several vectors from several fram es, a dedicated Digital Signal Processor (DSP) can be assigned to analyze and predict the trajectories of the objects in m otion. With the application of 2-D edge detectors, such as Sobel or Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) operators, the objects in m otion can be isolated from the background and thus be easily identified. In addition, a m iddleware-based technique derived from Directional Discrete Cosine Transform (DDCT) is introduced to im prove the im age quality without sacrificing the system perform ance. We propose four new m odes of operations in DDCT for better im age com pression ratio. The experim ental results show that we can im prove the im age quality of the targets, isolate them from the background, and track them easily in both linear and exponential trajectories of the m otion.