The Anatomy of A Multi-Camera Video Surveillance System

We present a framework for multi-camera video surveillance. The framework consists of three phases: detection, representation, and recognition. The detection phase handles multi-source spatio-temporal data fusion for efficiently and reliably extracting motion trajectories from video. The representation phase summarizes raw trajectory data to construct hierarchical, invariant, and content-rich descriptions of the motion events. Finally, the recognition phase deals with event classification and identification on the data descriptors. Through empirical study in a parking-lot surveillance setting, we show that our spatio-temporal fusion scheme and biased sequence-data learning method are highly effective in identifying suspicious events.