Development of distributed intelligence surveillance networks

Future surveillance systems will perform a range of automatic image and signal analysis operations. As areas of surveillance increase and larger numbers of cameras and sensors are installed, the processing power of centralised computing systems will be rapidly exhausted. Next-generation surveillance systems are therefore likely to be based on distributed processing. With the switch from analogue to digital camera technology, the compression, encryption and local conversion of data already necessitate major local processing power and local intelligence. Efficient software tools are therefore needed for the assessment and building of distributed surveillance sys tems. For this purpose, VTT has developed a hardware test platform and software tools to support distributed systems design.