SBIR Phase II: A New Digital Video Surveillance System

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a digital video surveillance system prototype. Over the past few years, video surveillance systems have been moving from analog to digital. The success of a digital video surveillance system depends on three key enabling technologies: compression, search and retrieval and network transmission. Existing commercial systems generally use standard video compression techniques, which often result in higher memory and bandwidth requirements and jerky object motion. In current video search and retrieval, the existing systems offer only search-by-time and no search-by-content. In network transmission, today's systems use relatively simple techniques that tend to make remote monitoring slow and sluggish. The company is using a highly efficient compression algorithm that exploits the special characteristics of surveillance video and is based on a segmentation technique. This technique, when applied to video search and retrieval, leads to search-by-content, which is more efficient and effective in practical applications. Finally the proposed system will employ fast network transport protocols and scalability techniques to make remote monitoring faster, uninterrupted by network traffic surges, and to allow display on a range of user devices. This digital video surveillance system can be used to maintain the security of banks, airports, government buildings, corporate sites, homes, and small businesses. It can also be used to monitor the performance and operating conditions of machines and equipment