Abstract-Large-scale and high-resolution monitoring systems are ideal for many visual surveillance applications. However, existing approaches have insufficient resolution and low frame rate per second, or have high complexity and cost. We take inspiration from the human visual system and propose a multi-resolution design, e-Fovea, which provides peripheral vision with a steerable fovea that is in higher resolution. In this paper, we firstly present two user studies, with a total of 36 participants, to compare e-Fovea to two existing multi-resolution visual monitoring designs. The user study results show that for visual monitoring tasks, our e-Fovea design with steerable focus is significantly faster than existing approaches and preferred by users. We then present our design and implementation of e-Fovea, which combines both multi-resolution camera input and multi-resolution steerable projector output. Finally, we present our deployment of e-Fovea in three installations to demonstrate its feasibility.