Video Surveillance: Legally Blind?

This paper shows that most surveillance cameras fall well short of providing sufficient image quality, in both spatial resolution and colour reproduction, for the reliable identification of faces. In addition, the low resolution of surveillance images means that when compression is applied the MPEG/...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kovesi, P.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Cameras
CCTV
compression
Discrete cosine transforms
Face recognition
Frequency
Image coding
Image quality
Image resolution
Spatial resolution
surveillance
Transform coding
Video surveillance
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Summary:This paper shows that most surveillance cameras fall well short of providing sufficient image quality, in both spatial resolution and colour reproduction, for the reliable identification of faces. In addition, the low resolution of surveillance images means that when compression is applied the MPEG/JPEG DCT block size can be such that the spatial frequencies most important for face recognition are corrupted. Making things even worse, the compression process heavily quantizes colour information disrupting the use of pigmentation information to recognize faces. Indeed, the term 'security camera' is probably misplaced. Many surveillance cameras are legally blind, or nearly so.
DOI:10.1109/DICTA.2009.41