An Open Development Environment for Evaluation of Video Surveillance Systems*

We introduce the publicly available Open Development for Video Surveillance (ODViS) system that is specifically designed to support ongoing research in tracking and video surveillance. The system provides researchers with the ability to prototype tracking and event recognition techniques, to construct and manage ground truth data sets, and to evaluate the performance of these systems within a graphical user interface. Passive tracking and video surveillance systems are receiving an increasing amount of research attention both in academic and industrial laboratories. Meaningful evaluation of these tracking and surveillance systems is an important but often difficult task. Recent introduction of standard datasets for video surveillance systems, and a corresponding dialog related to empirical analysis have made significant progress [1]. The ODViS system is designed to complement these efforts by providing an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows researchers to link specific surveillance modules into the ODViS framework, a graphical interface for visualizing the behavior of tracking algorithms, and a performance evaluation component that supports comparison of different surveillance modules to one another or predefined ground truth.