Development of an Intelligent Omnivision Surveillance System

This publication describes an innovative intelligent omnivision video system, that stitches the images of four cameras together, resulting in one seamless image. This way the system generates a 360° view of the scene. An additional automatically controlled pan-tilt-zoom-camera provides a high resolution view of user defined regions of interest (ROI). In addition to the fusion of multiple camera images, the system has intelligent features like object detection and region-of-interest detection. The software architecture features configurable pipelines of image processing functions. All different steps in the pipeline like decoding, feature extraction, encoding, and visualization are implemented as modules inside this pipeline. It is easily possible to rearrange the pipeline and add new functions to the overall system. The pan-tilt-zoom camera is controlled by an embedded system that has been developed for this system. GPU-accelerated processing elements allows real-time panorama stitching. We show the application of our system in the field of maritime surveillance, but the system can also be used for robots.