Multiple target tracking across reliable multicast wireless networks
James N. Griffioen, W. Brent Seales, Rajendra Yavatkar · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
This paper presents a novel approach to high-performance video processing that avoids the use of special purpose hardware and achieves parallelism via a distributed system of high- performance workstations. An efficient network protocol allows mobile computers or mobile robots to remotely access the distributed video processing system over low-bandwidth wireless links. Despite the lack of special purpose hardware and expensive computing equipment, the system provides exceptional performance processing data at speeds that approach real-time. The novel contribution of our approach is the ability to process video in compressed format and efficiently distribute video data to a distributed system of workstations for processing. We describe the algorithms employed to achieve these features and demonstrate our approach by showing how it can be applied to two problem domains: multiple target tracking and video archive searching. We present experimental results that show that video data can be efficiently disseminated to a network or workstations with only a small (7%) increase in transfer time. We also show that processing can be performed efficiently (20 fps) directly on the compressed video without social purpose hardware.