| dc.description.abstract | This research explores the usage of embedded system technology in developing a vision system
to aid the process of monitoring traffic surveillance video. The increasing affordability of powerful
processors and memory chips, availability of real-time operating systems, low complexity
intelligent algorithms and the coming-of-age of system development software are the key factor that
makes this development possible. An important application area where embedded vision system can
potentially and advantageously replace most known cameras and computer solutions is visual
traffic surveillance. Existing digital video surveillance systems provide the infrastructure only to
capture, store and distribute video, while leaving the task of threat detection exclusively to human
operators. The implementation of embedded vision system could reduce the need for human video
scanning and has the additional effect of a more reliable system. This system will detect any
existing stationary vehicle in its monitoring area and automatically convey the information to the
operators. The development of embedded vision system is divided into two major phases which are
the hardware integration and the software development. The main component for Embedded Vision
System hardware design is an x86 TS5500 Single Board Computer (SBC), Logitech QuickCam Pro
4000 webcam, compact flash memory card, PCMCIA wireless network card, and a Desktop PC.
The selection of x86 SBC is because of the function of size, speed, functionality, portability, lower
cost, lower power consumption, ruggedness and supported by GNU/Linux OS. The overall software
design is divided into three modules which are Image Acquisition, Image Processing and Object
Detection, and Data Transmission module. The image processing algorithm includes color space
conversion and motion analysis technique. In motion analysis, frame differencing, thresholding and
convolution matrix filtering techniques are applied to detect and analyze movement in image
sequence. Evaluations is performed on the processing time taken for overall smart camera
operation and image processing process, monitoring the CPU utilization on the SBC’s processor
during the program execution and observing the performance of the system implemented on
different hardware platform. Overall embedded vision system processing time in SBC is 38.82
seconds compared to 6.09 seconds in desktop PC. The CPU processing speed and the size of short
term memory (RAM) are the key factors that influence the performance of the embedded vision
system. Processing speed comparison between TS5500 and TS7200 is being made and the result
shows that TS7200 executes twice faster than TS5500. However, unsuitable camera driver obstruct
the usage of TS7200 as the hardware platform. A significant discovery has been made in this
research where the usage of shared memory is proven to save almost half of overall execution time
for the embedded vision system. The stationary vehicle detection process is executed on the
embedded vision system to evaluate the accuracy of detection made by the system. The experiment
is made by using fifty samples of road image. From this experiment, the successful rate for
stationary vehicle detection is 72%. | en_US |
