Cognitive visual tracking and camera control

Cognitive visual tracking is the process of observing and understanding the behavior of a moving person. This paper presents an efficient solution to extract, in real-time, high-level information from an observed scene, and generate the most appropriate commands for a set of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras in a surveillance scenario. Such a high-level feedback control loop, which is the main novelty of our work, will serve to reduce uncertainties in the observed scene and to maximize the amount of information extracted from it. It is implemented with a distributed camera system using SQL tables as virtual communication channels, and Situation Graph Trees for knowledge representation, inference and high-level camera control. A set of experiments in a surveillance scenario show the effectiveness of our approach and its potential for real applications of cognitive vision.

► This paper presents a solution for cognitive visual tracking. ► The main novelty is a high-level feedback control loop for a set of PTZ cameras. ► A distributed camera system is implemented using SQL tables for inter-communication. ► FMTHL and SGTs are used for knowledge representation, inference and camera control. ► The approach is validated with real-world experiments in a surveillance scenario.