Improving security surveillance by hidden cameras

Increasing solicitudes about security demand better, robust and effective solutions. Security cameras are playing a vital role in this regard and the surveillance technology is improving rapidly. However, these cameras are usually installed at obvious and visible locations which are often exploitable by the criminals either by hiding themselves from the camera, choosing an alternative path or deceiving the camera. This situation can be overcome to a large extent if the cameras are installed at hidden places looking through narrow regions, e.g. camera fixed inside the building and looking through the window curtain slits. However, this solution poses new challenges in terms of capturing the video through slits and accumulating the information to a meaningful view. In this paper we propose an effective and robust solution to this problem that automatically extracts the slit regions and merges them over a large number of frames to construct a panoramic view. Moreover, such a security surveillance system will be subjected to the sudden illumination variations. We effectively handle such variations by incorporating robustness in the proposed framework. A large number of experiments are performed on various indoor and outdoor real video sequences. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Experiments are also performed to objectively assess the perceptual quality of the resulting panoramic images. Our results are even better than the existing commercial software.