Austrian Research Centers GmbH

Distributed smart cameras (DSC) are an emerging technology for a broad range of important applications including smart rooms, surveillance, entertainment, tracking, and motion analysis. By having access to many views and through cooperation among the individual cameras, these DSCs have the potential to realize many more complex and challenging applications than single-camera systems. This article focuses on the system-level software required for efficient streaming applications on single smart cameras as well as on networks of DSCs. Embedded platforms with limited resources do not provide middleware services well known on general-purpose platforms. Our software frame-work supports transparent intra- and interprocessor communication while keeping the memory and computation overhead very low. The software framework is based on a publisher–subscriber architecture and provides mechanisms for dynamically loading and unloading software components as well as for graceful degradation in case of software- and hardware-related faults. The software framework has been completely implemented and tested on our embedded smart cameras consist-ing of an ARM-based network processor and several digital signal processors. Two case studies demonstrate the feasibility of our approach