Statistical modeling and performance characterization of a real-time dual camera surveillance system

The engineering of computer vision systems that meet application specific computational and accuracy requirements is crucial to the deployment of real-life computer vision systems. This paper illustrates how past work on a systematic engineering methodology for vision systems performance characterization can be used to develop a real-time people detection and zooming system to meet given application requirements. We illustrate that by judiciously choosing the system modules and performing a careful analysis of the influence of various tuning parameters on the system it is possible to: perform proper statistical inference, automatically set control parameters and quantify limits of a dual-camera real-time video surveillance system. The goal of the system is to continuously provide a high resolution zoomed-in image of a person´s head at any location of the monitored area. An omni-directional camera video is processed to detect people and to precisely control a high resolution foveal camera, which has pan, tilt and zoom capabilities. The pan and tilt parameters of the foveal camera and its uncertainties are shown to be functions of the underlying geometry, lighting conditions, background color/contrast, relative position of the person with respect to both cameras as well as sensor noise and calibration errors. The uncertainty in the estimates is used to adaptively estimate the zoom parameter that guarantees with a user specified probability, α, that the detected person´s face is contained and zoomed within the image