A Distributed Domotic Surveillance System

Abstract: Distributed video surveillance has a direct application in intelligent home automation or domotics (from the Latin word domus, that means “home”, and informatics); in particular, in-house videosurveillance can provide good support for people with some difficulties (e.g., elderly or disabled people) living alone and with a limited autonomy. New hardware technologies for surveillance are now affordable and provide high reliability. Problems related to reliable software solutions are not completely solved, especially concerning the application of general-purpose computer vision techniques in indoor environments. Indeed, assuming the objective is to detect the presence of people, track them, and recognize dangerous behaviours by means of abrupt changes in their posture, robust techniques must cope with non-trivial difficulties. In particular, luminance changes and shadows must be taken into account, frequent posture changes must be faced, and large and long-lasting occlusions are common due to the vicinity of the cameras and the presence of furnitureand doors that can often hide parts of the person’s body. These problems are analyzed and solutions based on background suppression, appearance-based probabilistic tracking, and probabilistic reasoning for posture recognition are described.

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