Attention and anticipation in complex scene analysis an application to video surveillance

We report on a video surveillance system that has anticipatory and attentive capabilities in order to efficiently cope with its resource limitations in analyzing complex visual scenes. We base our system On a mathematical-physical framework for cognitive engineering of cybernetic systems [8]. Anticipation and selection of attention allow the analysis system to actively search for potential targets in the visual scene. The target selection mechanism is based on a simple scheme for detecting moving regions. In addition, anticipation ensures that a pattern recognition module will analyze all potential targets in the order in which they will escape the field of view of the video camera. This anticipatory mechanism is based on a simple escape-time measure. Furthermore, a utility measure is defined to improve the overall performance of the target selection and pattern recognition tasks, and is used as a means to change proactively the system's focus of attention.