Real-Time Surveillance of People on an Embedded DSP-Platform

This paper presents a set of techniques used in a real-time visual surveillance system. The system is implemented on a low-cost embedded DSP platform that is designed to work with stationary video sources. It consists of detection, a tracking and a classification module. The detector uses a statistical method to establish the background model and extract the foreground pixels. These pixels are grouped into blobs which are classified into single person, people in a group and other objects by the dynamic periodicity analysis. The tracking module adopts the mean shift algorithm to locate the target position. The system aims to control the human density in the surveilled scene and detect what happens abnormally. The major advantage of this system is the real-time capability and it only requires a video stream without other additional sensors. We evaluate the system in the real application, for example monitoring the subway entrance and the building hall, and the results prove the system’s superior performance.