Interactive Montages of Sprites for Indexing and Summarizing Security Video

In this video we present a new model of interaction for indexing and visualizing video in the context of security applications. We wish to index security video that contains relatively rare but important events, such as security video taken from large public or industrial facilities (e.g. a nuclear power plant) or exterior home security video from a residential neighborhood. We present a method of indexing video by arranging irregularly shaped icons or sprites into a montage representing motion events or security events within the original video scene. The sprites in the montage are used as an index into the original video. We also generate video montages to summarize video in which motion events are compressed and overlayed in a video of shorter time duration. This summary video also acts as an index into the original video stream. We use a simple, novel method of extracting sprites for the image and video montages based on incrementally building a Gaussian mixture model with conjugate priors for the background. We then use fast morphological operators to extract foreground elements. Our approach can be viewed as a fast maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference procedure in a layered image model. The contributions of this work are new interaction and summary schemes that allow viewers to potentially survey hours of security video in the order of minutes.