Distributed Network of Adaptive and Self-Reconfigurable Active Vision Systems

Abstract

The performance of a computer vision system depends on the accuracy of visual information extracted by the sensors and the system’s visual-processing capabilities. To derive optimum information from the sensed data, the system must be capable of identifying objects of interest (OOIs) and activities in the scene. Active vision systems intend to capture OOIs with the highest possible resolution to extract the optimum visual information by calibrating the configuration spaces of the cameras. As the data processing and reconfiguration of cameras are interdependent, it becomes very challenging for advanced active vision systems to perform in real time. Due to limited computational resources, model-based asymmetric active vision systems only work in known conditions and fail miserably in unforeseen conditions. Symmetric/asymmetric systems employing artificial intelligence, while they manage to tackle unforeseen environments, require iterative training and thus are not reliable for real-time applications. Thus, the contemporary symmetric/asymmetric reconfiguration systems proposed to obtain optimum configuration spaces of sensors for accurate activity tracking and scene understanding may not be adequate to tackle unforeseen conditions in real time. To address this problem, this article presents an adaptive self-reconfiguration (ASR) framework for active vision systems operating co-operatively in a distributed blockchain network. The ASR framework enables active vision systems to share their derived learning about an activity or an unforeseen environment, which learning can be utilized by other active vision systems in the network, thus lowering the time needed for learning and adaptation to new conditions. Further, as the learning duration is reduced, the duration of the reconfiguration of the cameras is also reduced, yielding better performance in terms of understanding of a scene. The ASR framework enables resource and data sharing in a distributed network of active vision systems and outperforms state-of-the-art active vision systems in terms of accuracy and latency, making it ideal for real-time applications.