Intelligent surveillance system with see-through technology

This paper proposes a new intelligent surveillance system for parking lot management in underground environments. The feature based image stitching and image blending techniques are used to let video streams captured by multiple cameras be fused into single output whose blind area could be easily seen through. Such a system allows that anyone can immediately understand what is going on in the whole monitored area with a simple glance and without prior geometrical knowledge of the place because the blind area is translucent. The image stitching processes consists of four main parts:(1) feature correspondence detection and fundamental matrix estimation, (2) outlier filtering scheme based on the epipolar geometry and RANSAC, (3) computing the homography matrices between each pair of images, (4) projectively warping the images with their corresponding homography matrices, and conducting image fusion with the non-overlapping parts of the warped images. Finally, the process of translucent blending is applied to eliminate the blind areas inside the stitched image, and then the corresponding cameras behind the occluding pillar provide pixels for translucentizing. The authors have implemented the preliminary system with six surveillance cameras at underground parking lot environments, and experiment results of real world video sequences have been performed to verify the proposed design.