Distributed video surveillance using smart cameras

Video surveillance systems have become an indispensable tool for the security and organization of public and private areas. Most of the current commercial video surveillance systems rely on a classical client/server architecture to perform face and object recognition. In order to support the more complex and advanced video surveillance systems proposed in the last years, companies are required to invest resources in order to maintain the servers dedicated to the recognition tasks. In this work, we propose a novel distributed protocol for a face recognition system that exploits the computational capabilities of the surveillance devices (i.e. cameras) to perform the recognition of the person. The cameras fall back to a centralized server if their hardware capabilities are not enough to perform the recognition. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm we simulate and test the 1NN and weighted kNN classification algorithms via extensive experiments on a freely available dataset. As a prototype of surveillance devices we have considered Raspberry PI entities. By means of simulations, we show that our algorithm is able to reduce up to 50% of the load from the server with no negative impact on the quality of the surveillance service.