On the use of real-time agents in distributed video analysis systems

Today' s technologies in video analysis use state of the art systems and formalisms like onthologies and dataware-housing to handle huge amount of data generated from low-level descriptors to high-level descriptors. In the IST CARETAKER project we develop a multi-dimensional database with distributed features to add a centric data view of the scene shared between all the sensors of a network. We propose to enhance possibilities of this kind of system by delegating the intelligence to a lot of other entities, also known as "Agents" which are specialized little applications, able to walk across the network and work on dedicated sets of data related to their core domain. In other words, we can reduce, or enhance, the complexity of the analysis by adding or not feature specific agents, and processing is limited to the data concerned by the processing. This article explains how to design and develop an agent oriented systems which can be used by a video analysis datawarehousing, We also describe how this methodology can distribute the intelligence over the system, and how the system can be extended to obtain a self reasoning architecture using cooperative agents. We will demonstrate this approach.