Vision systems analysing images from multiple cameras are becoming the norm, be it in large scale surveillance, advanced manufacturing or traffic monitoring. COPCAMS leverages recent advances in embedded computing platforms to develop large scale, integrated Cognitive & Perceptive Video Systems (CPVS). It aims at exploiting new programmable accelerators, like manycores but also embedded Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), General Purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPUs), Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), to power a new generation of greener, low-power, smart cameras and gateways.
A Paradigm Change Fuelled by Embedded Computing Advances
COPCAMS contributed to a paradigm change: Whereas previous generation of systems had simple cameras connected to powerful centralised computing servers through high-bandwidth networking, the COPCAMS vision pushed low-power high-performance computing system on the edge of the system and in the distributed aggregators. These “smart cameras” and “smart aggregators” process video streams, extract meaningful semantic information and either decide locally whether or not the streams’ contents are of interest and are worth propagating, annotate compressed video stream with meta-information computed on higher resolution raw video streams, or uses information from other sensor – e.g. acoustic sensors, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors – to drive the camera towards actual action. Additionally, decentralised, distributed analyses or decision-making saves both energy and bandwidth while opening opportunities for new distributed applications.