Event-driven video coding for outdoor wireless monitoring cameras

Abstract

Reducing communication cost is crucial for outdoor wireless monitoring cameras which are constrained by limited energy budgets. From event detection point of view, traditional video coding schemes such as H.264 are inefficient as they ignore the "meaning" of video content and thus waste many bits to convey irrelevant information. To take advantage of the powerful computing resource on cameras, we propose a novel event-driven video coding scheme. Unlike previous approach that attempts to find anomalous image frame with potential events, we propose to detect salient regions in each image and transmit the image fragments marked with saliency to the receiver. This scheme rarely drops an event as it transmits all image fragments with potential events, and also requires no training procedure. The experimental results show that it performs substantially better than conventional video coding schemes for outdoor monitoring task.