Target container: A target-centric parallel programming abstraction for video-based surveillance

We introduce a novel abstraction, the target container (TC), which serves as a parallel programming model and execution framework for developing complex applications for tracking multiple targets in a large-scale camera network. The key insight is to allow the domain expert (e.g., a vision researcher) to focus on the algorithmic details of target tracking and let the system deal with providing the computational resources (cameras, networking, and processing) to enable target tracking. Each TC has a one-to-one correspondence with a target, possibly tracked from multiple cameras. The domain expert provides the code modules for target tracking (such as detectors and trackers) as handlers to the TC system. The handlers are invoked dynamically by the TC system to discover new targets (detector) and to follow existing targets (tracker). The TC system also provides an interface for merging TCs whenever they are determined to be corresponding to the same target. This paper presents the design of the TC system, details of an experimental prototype, and an example application to demonstrate the simplicity of using the TC programming model.