Goal driven visual object identification and tracking system for a heterogeneous sensor network

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A smart space is a physical environment that is saturated with sensory, computing and communication capabilities together with the software that integrates them. It will anticipate the needs of its occupants and will provide services as and when they are needed. Such spaces have applications in diverse areas such as healthcare, manufacturing, education, environment monitoring, command centers and security. A key building block that is needed to make such a system a reality is the capability to identify, locate and track objects (both animate and inanimate) in this space. Such a capability also paves way for determining patterns of activity among the occupants of a smart space. In this proposal, we discuss the development of a software framework together with a set of tools for sensory data collection and analysis that will implement this building block for use in a sensor network.Each tool in this system will encapsulate an algorithm that provides a particular functionality such as face detection, speech recognition and object location etc. More importantly, each tool will also incorporate the knowledge required to use the algorithm within itself. Such knowledge includes information about input data, algorithm parameters, output formats as well as information about the task it can accomplish and how well it can accomplish this task.Our primary contribution in this proposal is the development of the software infrastructure that allows a society of expert tools to accomplish a given task, development of  templates for individual tools, development of knowledge representation mechanisms and vocabularies for individual tools as well as example based learning methods that allow certain tools to expand their capabilities.A critical area that we plan to investigate is the aspects of security and privacy in a smart space, which are now gaining considerable attention. We propose to develop a set of security and privacy requirements for a smart space as well as develop the algorithms and mechanisms to support these requirements.