Exploratory search of long surveillance videos

  • Authors:
  • Gregory D. Castanon;Andre Louis Caron;Venkatesh Saligrama;Pierre-marc Jodoin

  • Affiliations:
  • Boston University, Boston, MA, USA;Universite de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, PQ, Canada;Boston University, Boston, MA, USA;Universite de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, PQ, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We present a fast and flexible content-based retrieval method for surveillance video. Designing a video search robust to uncertain activity duration, high variability in object shapes and scene content is challenging. We propose a two-step approach to video search. First, local features are inserted into an inverted index using locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). Second, we utilize a novel dynamic programming (DP) approach to robustify against temporal distortion, limited obscuration and imperfect queries. DP exploits causality to assemble the local features stored in the index into a video segment which matches the query video. Pre-processing of archival video is performed in real-time, and retrieval speed scales as a function of the number of matches rather than video length. We derive bounds on the rate of false positives, demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for counting, motion pattern recognition and abandoned object applications using seven challenging video datasets and compare with existing work.