Remotely reconfigurable hardware–software platform with web service interface for automated video surveillance

This paper presents a reconfigurable hardware platform for general-purpose video processing. The proposed design is a step towards portable, web-enabled devices which, unlike most existing smart cameras, are to a large degree autonomous and have substantial intelligence embedded. The device is based on programmable logic, microcontrollers, and dedicated communication modules. It is able to acquire an input frame using a built-in camera, process the image in a massively parallel manner, and expose its functionality as a web service compliant with the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Thanks to the FPGA technology used for main functionality implementation, the system’s hardware can be locally or remotely reconfigured in order to optimize it on a very low level for user-defined tasks. Moreover, the image processing core is implemented using a C-to-HDL compiler to reduce time to market when deploying new functionalities. We demonstrate the capabilities of our device on two example applications: moving object detection and face recognition.