Jitter-constrained camera scheduling in CCTV surveillance networks

CCTV-based surveillance networks are widely used for security in public places. An important installation problem is to assign a camera schedule with which the system can choose which camera to record its video frames to storage at a certain time. Because of the resource constrained and bandwidth limitation, only a subset of raw video frames can be recorded for a camera. For security concerns, it is expected that the captured frames from the same camera should have equal temporal distance between any two successive ones. If all the distances are not the same, there is jitter. An optimal schedule should minimize the amount of temporal jitter as well as ensure that the jitter between two successive video frames is not greater than a bound. In this paper, the formulation of the scheduling problems is presented. Furthermore, efficient scheduling algorithm is proposed to find feasible schedules given a jitter bound. Experimental results show the efficiency and practicability of the proposed algorithms.