Optimization of Outdoor Video Surveillance

Video surveillance has a growing importance in public safety services. Departments and organizations delivering public safety and security services often need to resort to covertness in their activities. They usually compromise on distance, lens size and light to insure secrecy; these compromises present challenges on the quality and usefulness of the captured video. Moreover, outdoor surveillance systems, especially over long distances, are often constrained to wireless networks to transport the video back to the monitoring offices. The design of such application is multi-faceted and covers both video processing and the delivery network. In this paper, we study the challenges of video surveillance, covering most of the phases of a typical surveillance system, and present a roadmap to render the surveillance video, collected over long distances, useful in the pursuit of investigations and responsive to the requirements of different target recognition levels.