Motion Activated Video Surveillance Using TI DSP
Ching-Kai Huang, Tsuhan Chen · 1999
Traditional video surveillance takes a huge amount of storage space. Recording everything captured by a surveillance camera consumes excessively the storage space and hence limits the duration of video that can be stored. In addition, recording everything makes it time-consuming for a human to review the stored video. All these disadvantages limit the effectiveness of traditional video surveillance. In this paper, we propose to solve these problems by recording only video that contains important information, i.e., video that contains motion in the scene. This can be done with a digital video camera and a DSP algorithm that detects motion. The TI DSP ‘C54 is perfect for this application, since it is small, cheap and requires very low power. In this paper, we report a video surveillance system we developed based on TI DSP ‘C54. In this system, reliable motion detection is a non-trivial task. Especially, when the lighting condition changes, it is difficult to distinguish real motion from lighting changes. We present our algorithm that robustly distinguishes motion from lighting changes by removing the mean from the frame difference signal.