Analyzing the Suitability of Cloud-based Multimedia Surveillance Systems

Due to increased security threats, new generations of multimedia surveillance systems have emerged. These systems integrate multiple media streams such as video, audio, and images from various sensors in order to better comprehend the current situation and provide useful information to protect lives and resources of individuals and organizations. Although there exists many such systems, most of them work in isolation to serve individual needs. The existing systems still face the problem of media processing overload, massive storage requirements, ubiquitous and concurrent access constraints, scalability, reliability, and lack of collaboration and sharing, among others. This paper reports our observation of cloud computing suitability for ubiquitous multimedia surveillance systems and suggests, with few reservations, that the aforementioned problems are minimized when using cloud computing as enabling technology for these systems. The study is conducted by developing a proof of concept prototype of cloud-based multimedia surveillance system.