Communications of the ACM
Vigilant Camera Eye
The Smart Eyes camera (highlighted in the green box) records a soccer match. The software focuses on salient events such as a person (highlighted in the red box) on the edge of the field.
Credit: Fraunhofer FIT
Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology have developed an automated camera system that replicates some functions of the human eye and brain. The researchers say that Smart Eyes' capabilities in identifying and processing moving images could be used to enhance security in public areas and buildings.
The system, developed as part of the European Union's Smart Eyes: Attending and Recognizing Instances of Salient Events project, makes use of a fixed surveillance camera that covers a certain area and two ultra-active stereo cameras. The hardware resembles human eyes in that the cameras can fix on and follow various points quickly in succession, but also can zoom in on details.
The heart of the system is a program that automatically analyzes image sequences by ascertaining the degree of movement of each pixel, identifying the particular active areas of a scene, learning motion patterns and storing them as models, identifying and classifying events, and identifying image patterns. The system picks out salient events and focuses on them using the active stereo cameras.
From Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
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