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

智能空间是一种物理环境，它充满了感知、计算和通信能力，以及集成这些能力的软件。它将预测其居住者的需求，并在需要时提供服务。这种空间在医疗、制造、教育、环境监测、指挥中心和安全等不同领域都有应用。使这样的系统成为现实所需的一个关键构件是识别、定位和跟踪这个空间中的对象(包括有生命的和无生命的)的能力。这种能力还为确定智能空间居住者的活动模式铺平了道路。在这个方案中，我们讨论了一个软件框架的开发以及一组用于传感器数据收集和分析的工具，这些工具将实现用于传感器网络的构建块。该系统中的每个工具都将封装一个算法，该算法提供特定的功能，如人脸检测、语音识别和目标定位等。更重要的是，每个工具本身也将包含使用该算法所需的知识。这些知识包括关于输入数据、算法参数、输出格式的信息，以及关于它可以完成的任务以及完成这项任务的程度的信息。我们在这项提议中的主要贡献是开发软件基础设施，使专家工具社会能够完成给定的任务，为个别工具开发通用模板，为个别工具开发知识表示机制和词汇，以及允许某些工具扩展其能力的基于实例的学习方法。我们计划调查的一个关键领域是智能空间中的安全和隐私方面，这些方面现在得到了相当大的关注。我们建议为智能空间制定一套安全和隐私要求，并开发支持这些要求的算法和机制。

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.