Policy Based Storage Abstraction For Video Surveillance Systems

Today storage is the worst bottleneck for video surveillance systems, which are integral part of any institution. We trust our privacy and security to Network Video Recording (NVR) devices, which is programmed to overwrite all the way from start once finished up. There are chances that really important video data can be get deleted on the run while the less important still stays somewhere on the storage drive. The continuous push of multiple streams of video data to the network also chokes the surveillance network, and makes for administrators nightmare. We propose a policy-driven infrastructure to overcome these issues of storage and network, built on commodity hardware. Our system breaks the large video chunk generated by streaming devices to small and manageable chunks, before pushing to the network, labeled with a priority mark. This make it easy for an administrator to force a specific policy decision on it, which can be marking it for speedy deletion or safe storage. This also opens the possibility of edge computing with a selective push to the core network, based on the network availability and priority of the data. Low power single board devices such as Raspberry Pi replace the traditional NVR devices in the system, saving on cost and energy. The project develops a manageable and economically viable video surveillance system for moderate to large scale institutions, where streamed data can have varying importance or precedence. We expect better utilization of network bandwidth, safer and selective storage of sensitive data, and a major cut in setup costs from our research and findings.