Extending surveillance systems capabilities using BDI cooperative sensor agents

Abstract

In this paper we describe the Cooperative Sensor Agents (CSA), a logical framework of autonomous agents working in sensor network environments. CSA is a two-layer framework. In the first layer, called Sensor Layer, each agent controls and manages individual sensors. Agents in Sensor Layer have different capabilities depending on their functional complexity and limitation related to specific sensor nature aspects. One agent may need to cooperate in order to achieve better and more accurate performance, or need additional capabilities that it does not have. This cooperation takes place doing a coalition formation in the Second Layer (Coalition Layer) of our framework. In this paper we have proposed the CSA framework architecture and its associated protocols for coalition management. The autonomous agents are modeled using BDI paradigm and they have control over their internal state. But cooperative problem solving occurs when a group of autonomous agents choose to work together to achieve a common goal or use additional capabilities and make a coalition. We present an experimentation of the Cooperative Sensor Agents in Surveillance Systems. In this environment, the agent perception is carried out by visual sensors and the coalition is made in order to use capabilities of other autonomous agents such as recording. Each vision agent is able to detect faces and the coalition formation extending global capabilities of surveillance system using cooperative strategies.

A multi-agent architecture to support active fusion in a visual sensor network

“…Jadex [14] is a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) Multi-Agent model which is FIPA compliant [13]. The BDI model provides a way to conceptualize the system and structure its design [15]. The architecture is built by using different types of agents and it is described more in detail in [15,16].…”

Distributed Active-Camera Control Architecture Based on Multi-Agent Systems

“…So, this work proposes a MAS architecture for support advanced controls for active camera sensors in the video surveillance environment. There are some previous works done by our research group also facing the problem of still/active cameras management via MAS, like the proposed in [6,4,13]. However this previous works do not contemplate the data fusion as an integral part of the architecture itself and its management with MAS.…”

Data fusion to improve trajectory tracking in a Cooperative Surveillance Multi-Agent Architecture

“…This architecture is a logical framework of autonomous agents working in sensor network environments and it is implemented using the BDI model. It is composed of several agent types: surveillance-sensor agent, that controls a specific sensor; fusion center agent, which has a global view of the environment being monitoring; interface agent, that uses as input/output of surveillance system; record agent, which is in charge of record a specific Digital Video Record (DVR) device [20]; etc. The fusion center agent has the global view of the environment being monitoring, also it is in charge of the creation of the local fusion agent and the coalition.…”

“…Then, the concept of coalition appears when a group of autonomous agents choose to work together to achieve a temporal common goal. The process to make a coalition is called Coalition Formation (CF), and it is widely studied [21][22][23][24], although there are few works related to surveillance systems [20]. A CF starts at a certain moment to achieve one task, and when this task ends the coalition breaks off.…”