Utility based decision support engine for camera view selection in multimedia surveillance systems

Abstract

Design and implementation of an effective surveillance system is a challenging task. In practice, a large number of CCTV cameras are installed to prevent illegal and unacceptable activities where a human operator observes different camera views and identifies various alarming cases. But reliance on the human operator for real-time response can be expensive as he may be unable to pay full attention to all camera views at the same time. Moreover, the complexity of a situation may not be easily perceivable by the operator for which he might require additional support in response to an adverse situation. In this paper, we present a Decision Support Engine (DSE) to select and schedule most appropriate camera views that can help the operator to take an informed decision. For this purpose, we devise a utility based approach where the utility value changes based on automatically detected events in different surveillance zones, event co-relation, and operator's feedback. In addition to the selected camera views, we propose to synthetically embed extra information around the camera views such as event summary and suggested action plan to globally perceive the current situation. The experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed decision support system.