Visual Sensor Networks (VSNs)

There are over 70 million surveillance cameras in the US today. Installed both outdoors and indoors, such camera networks capture a vast amount of visual data that are key for security/safety applications, traffic analysis, environmental monitoring, etc. However, in order to extract actionable information from the captured video streams, a number of fundamental challenges must be addressed. Below are described recent and ongoing research projects focused on some of these challenges.

We have been also involved in building complete VSN systems aimed at the detection and localization of people as well as recgonizing human activities in indoor environments either without or with expectation of privacy. Applications of such systems include access monitoring, occupancy sensing, smart-room controls, etc. Two such project are described below.