DICE: A distributed protocol for camera-aided video surveillance

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 person 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 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. By means of simulations, we show that our algorithm is able to reduce up to 50% the load of the server with no negative impact on the quality of the surveillance service.