MultiVision manufactures a series of proprietary digital video surveillance products:
Netserver DIY, Netserver Pro, Netserver SUPER, Smart Image Processor, NetDVS, etc.
(Refer to company and product brochures for details) It has successfully bid and
implemented projects for Check Lap Kok International Airport, Tsing Ma Bridge
Crossing in Hong Kong, Tiananmen Square in the People Republic of China and State
Rail Authority of New South Wales in Australia.
Despite success in the production and distribution of their digital surveillance products,
MultiVision needs to improve its products in order to stay ahead among its competitors.
MultiVision anticipates that efficient and effective video retrieval will soon become an
indispensable functionality in the next generation of digital surveillance products. In
addition to that, MultiVision also envisions that increasing the reliability of the hard
disks in video recording server could significantly reduce the downtime of video
recording server and the maintenance costs, which in turns increase the competitiveness
of the MultiVision’s products.
The current interim solution to the video retrieval problem in MultiVision’s current
products is to perform an exhaustive search on the whole video archive. This is
inherently a time consuming process because it has to decode each video frame and
analyze its content to see if a particular video segment satisfies the user specified query.
On the other hand, MultiVision does not have sufficient tools for video content analysis
and thus not all user queries can be reliably translated to proper searching criteria based
on the limited set of analysis tools.
As for the hard disks reliability problem, MultiVision currently does not have any good
solution in hand. MultiVision must therefore look for techniques to increase the
reliability of hard disks in video recording servers.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong has a team of
experts in the fields of video/image processing and computer system, and should be in a
good position to assist MultiVision with state-of-the-art technologies from their recent
research [1-5]. In particular, the research in [5] provides a fundamental framework for
video/image content analysis that is conducive to content-based video retrieval
application. On the other hand, the team also has experiences in system engineering.
Over the years, the team members have involved in a number of industrial projects
which provide practical solutions to the problems encountered in real-world
applications. The team should be able to provide practical solutions to increase the
reliability of the hard disks in video recording servers.
[1] S. Zhong, F. Chin, Y.S. Cheung and D. Kwan, “Hierarchical motion estimation
based on visual patterns for video coding,” in IEEE Proc. ICASSP’ 96, pp.
2325-2328 (1996).
[2] Boris Wai-Sing Yiu, Kwan-Yee Kenneth Wong, Francis Y.L. Chin and R.H.Y.
Chung, "Explicit Contour Model for Vehicle Tracking with Automatic Hypothesis
Verification", to appear in Proc. International Conference on Image Processing
(ICIP05).
[3] Angie W.K. So, Kenneth K.Y. Wong, Ronald H.Y. Chung, and Francis Y.L. Chin,
"Shadow Detection for Vehicles by Locating the Object-Shadow Boundary", to
appear in Proc. IASTED Conference on Signal and Image Processing (SIP 2005).
[4] Ronald H.Y. Chung, Francis Y.L. Chin, Kwan-Yee K. Wong, K.P. Chow, T. Luo
and Henry S.K. Fung, "Efficient Block-based Motion Segmentation Method using
Motion Vector Consistency", in Proc. IAPR Conference on Machine Vision
Applications (MVA2005), Tsukuba, Japan, pp.550-553, 2005.
[5] R.H.Y. Chung, N.H.C. Yung and P.Y.S. Cheung, "An Efficient Parameter-less
Quadrilateral-Based Image Segmentation Method", to appear in IEEE Trans.
PAMI.
