Video Analysis Software to Identify Salient Events
In the world of UAV surveillance, the running joke is that the average operator chair has absorbed 17,000 farts. This punishment is a testament to the amount of man hours watching video screens with nothing happening, just to find the proverbial needle in the haystack.
What if there is a better way, to have a computer parse out the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff? IBM has proposed a solution in its patent application.
The invention is a piece of software that detects changes in foreground objects, rating movement and extracting only the relevant video for review by human eyes. By way of example, the application refers to a police operation to investigate drug smuggling. The hours and days of UAV video footage can be quickly analyzed by the software to detect the “event of interest”, such as “images of armed people moving containers into a suspected drug storage facility”, that may only comprise a few minutes.
Here is Claim 1 of the application: “A computer program product for summarizing image content from video images received from a moving camera, the computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having program code embodied therewith, the program code executable by a processor, to perform method steps comprising:
- detecting foreground objects in the images;
- determining moving objects of interest from the foreground objects;
- tracking the moving objects;
- rating movements of the tracked objects;
- and generating a list of highly rated segments within the video images based on the ratings.”
Hopefully, the result will be more free-roaming farts.
Title: “SUMMARIZING SALIENT EVENTS IN UNMANNED AERIAL VIDEOS”
US Patent Application Publication No: 20140328511
Filed (USA): January 30, 2013
Published: November 6, 2014
