Smart Camera Design and Applications

The design of an ideal Smart Camera is presented, and typical vision based applications for security and surveillance running on a Smart Camera are demonstrated. Various design considerations - being ability to execute computationally intensive and highly parallel image processing algorithms in real time, handling large data, multiple interfaces for communication, programmable, robust and round the clock reliable operations - are discussed in detail. The features of an ideal Smart Camera are presented on the basis of the above design considerations. A case study of an ideal Smart Camera developed by the presenter´s team at Siemens Corporate Technology, India, is presented together with some of the vision based applications developed running on it - Human Detection System, Traffic light control by Queue Detection, Traffic light control by Vehicle Presence Detection and Static Vehicle Detection for Tunnel Safety. The design team has also achieved significant results in terms of improvements in real-time performance by optimizing these applications by algorithm redesign and by intelligent embedded implementation. The talk concludes with the importance of processor architectural knowledge for optimal real time performance of any vision based application running on a Smart Camera