Robust Surveillance on Compressed Video: Uniform Performance from High to Low Bitrates

In this paper, we discuss methods to enable robust surveillance on compressed video. We show that if the particular surveillance algorithm that is likely to be run on the compressed video is known a priori, then steps can be taken during the encoding process to facilitate the performance of the algorithm. We show that by performing signal processing on the input video signal before it is encoded, or by adaptively changing the parameters of the encoding process, we can make the resulting signal more robust to degradations in the encoding process. The result is better and more consistent tracking on the compressed video from high to low bitrates, but with some loss in PSNR. We demonstrate the validity of this approach for mean shift tracking running on MPEG-4 coded video.