Intelligent, dynamic, long-term digital surveilance media storage system

• US 20060182357A1
• Filed: 02/15/2005
• Published: 08/17/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 02/15/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Panasonic Corporation (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Limited (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)
• Inventors: Lee, K.C., Ozdemir, Hasan Timucin, Liu, Lipin
• Granted Patent: US 7,751,632 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 382/239
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 20/52 Surveillance or monitoring of activities, e.g. for recognising suspicious objects recognising microscopic objects G06V20/69
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 13/19669 Event triggers storage or change of storage policy

Abstract

An Intelligent, dynamic, long-term digital Surveillance Media storage System (ISMS), proposes an intelligent, dynamic, digital media storage mechanism for digital surveillance applications that can analyze media streams in real-time and provide flexible, scalable, and self-adjustable encoding and indexing mechanisms based on actual needs for digital surveillance systems. The system includes several subsystems, such as: (1) a media stream retriever/receiver; (2) a content-based description generator; (3) an intelligent engine with metadata description storage and media file storage (4) an event manager; (5) a media stream writer; and (6) an encoding optimizer.

Claims

1. A digital surveillance media storage system, comprising:

a media analyzer receiving a media stream and performing an analysis of the media;

an encoding format selector receiving results of the analysis and selecting one of plural encoding formats based on the results; and

an encoder engine encoding the media according to the encoding format selected by said encoding format selector.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising a common metadata description index storage area that records information on property, location, and state of media files.

3. The system of claim 1, further comprising a media file storage area containing encoded media files.

4. The system of claim 1, further comprising an encoding optimizer periodically re-encoding encoded media streams already stored in the system to reduce storage utilization while maintaining accuracy of data based on a predefined set of application criteria.

5. The system of claim 4, wherein said encoding optimizer processes media streams in multiple stages over time, each stage including dynamic selection of an encoding format based on an amount of available storage space, stream lifetime, stream priority, and application-defined accuracy requirements.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the plural encoding formats include a skipping frames encoding format that can be dynamically selected in multiple stages of file encoding processes over a life time of a media file in the system.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein a media file propagates over time from relatively high accuracy and large size to relatively low accuracy and small size, the media file eventually being reduced to only a description of the media content based on MPEG7 before it is archived to secondary storage.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein said encoding format selector responds to semantic based content extraction results and event metadata to decide importance of an image before selection of an encoding method.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein an encoded file is re-processed after a predefined period of time to further reduce its size, and semantic based multi-stage compression is driven by user defined rules.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the plural encoding formats include an unchanged frame-based encoding format, wherein an unchanged portion of an image is stored in high resolution as relatively few frames over time that represent a background.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein a background frame is updated regularly to adapt to changing background conditions.

12. The system of claim 1, further comprising an event manager receiving and managing events of a stream of the media, wherein said encoding format selector further receives input from said event manager and selects the one of plural encoding formats based on the input.

13. The system of claim 12, further comprising a media stream receiver receiving a media stream and routing received events to said event manager while routing received media to said media analyzer.

14. The system of claim 1, further comprising a descriptor generator supplying descriptors for media based on the analysis of the media.

15. The system of claim 14, further comprising a file writer receiving encoded media and descriptors and storing the encoded media with the descriptors in a media datastore.