The goal of this US Ignite project is to develop and demonstrate the utility of 3D cameras on police cars connected to cloud-based computing via high-speed wireless networks. Camera-based surveillance systems play an important role in helping law enforcement manage public safety but existing systems have several drawbacks. The first limitation is that most current systems rely on static cameras, which limits the flexibility for law enforcement to deploy the cameras to targeted areas as needed. The second limitation is that most surveillance cameras do no work well in environments with poor visibility such as nighttime or fog. By combining back-end (or cloud-based)video processing with 3D cameras the project addresses both of these issues.
The project will install 3D cameras on police cars belonging to the Temple University campus police department and back-haul the video data via the Temple University GENI WiMax and campus WiFi infrastructures to a campus computing cluster for analysis with the results being relayed back to the police officers as alerts or other status. The project extends existing work on target tracking and detection to deal with 3D video feeds. The project in being run in conjunction with the Temple University campus police department which is providing domain expertise and facilitating testing of the prototype system.
