Network cameras have been growing rapidly in recent years. Thousands of public network cameras provide tremendous amount of visual information about the environment. There is a need to analyze this valuable information for a better understanding of the world around us. This paper presents an interactive web-based system that enables users to execute image analysis and computer vision techniques on a large scale to analyze the data from more than 65,000 worldwide cameras. This paper focuses on how to use both the system's website and Application Programming Interface (API). Given a computer program that analyzes a single frame, the user needs to make only slight changes to the existing program and choose the cameras to analyze. The system handles the heterogeneity of the geographically distributed cameras, e.g. different brands, resolutions. The system allocates and manages Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure cloud resources to meet the analysis requirements.

Date Published: 6 March 2015
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9408, Imaging and Multimedia Analytics in a Web and Mobile World 2015, 94080E (6 March 2015);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9408:
Imaging and Multimedia Analytics in a Web and Mobile World 2015
Qian Lin; Jan P. Allebach; Zhigang Fan, Editor(s)