Coopetitive multimedia surveillance

Abstract

'Coopetitive' interaction strategy has been shown to give better results than similar strategies like 'only cooperation', 'only competition' etc [7]. However, this has been studied only in the context of visual sensors and for handling non-simultaneous events. In this paper, we study this 'coopetitive' strategy from a multimedia surveillance system perspective, wherein the system needs to utilize multiple heterogeneous sensors and also handle multiple simultaneous events. Applying such an interaction strategy to multimedia surveillance systems is challenging because heterogeneous sensors have different capabilities for performing different sub-tasks as well as dissimilar response times. We adopt a merit-cum-availability based approach to allocate various sub-tasks to the competing sensors which eventually cooperate to achieve the specified system goal. Also, a 'coopetition' based strategy is adopted for effectively utilizing the information coming asynchronously from different data sources. Multiple simultaneous events (e.g. multiple intrusions) are handled by adopting a predictive strategy which estimates the exit time for each intruder and then uses this information for enhanced scheduling. The results obtained for two sets of surveillance experiments conducted with two active cameras and a motion sensor grid are promising. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.