A Middleware Framework for Dynamic Reconfiguration and Component Composition in Embedded Smart Cameras

摘要

Distributed embedded multi-processor smart cameras are central components in future intelligent video surveillance systems. Due to the complexity of video surveillance applications and the limited resources of the embedded smart cameras the set of employed analysis tasks has to be reconfigurable at runtime. In order to support dynamic reconfiguration in the resource-limited cameras a light-weight middleware for flexible algorithm communication and dynamic component composition is presented in this work. Based on a publisher-subscriber model the middleware aims at imposing only minimum communication overhead while providing adequate abstractions from algorithm interconnections. To further ease dynamic reconfiguration algorithms are provided as binary components complying with a special component model. A surveillance application can, therefore, be built by plumbing together several algorithm components. Permanent monitoring of all algorithm's resource and performance metrics allows the framework to detect possible resource overloading. By gracefully degrading the Quality-of-Service overloading can be prevented and system dependability is increased.