I²MTC 2008 – IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference Victoria, Vancouver Island, Canada, May 12–15, 2008
Monitoring System with Moving Object Detection Based on MSN Messenger Chia-Hung Lien*, Po-Tsun Chen**, Ying-Wen Bai**, and Ming-Bo Lin*** * Department of Computer science and Information Engineering, Lee-Ming Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, 243, R.O.C. **Department of Electronic Engineering, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan, 242, R.O.C ***Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, 106, R.O.C. Email:
[email protected]
Abstract – Monitoring systems are very important in our daily life. Monitoring systems exist in airports, banks, offices and even in our homes to keep us secure. A monitoring system based on an MSN Messenger that can detect moving objects has been developed. We have designed a smart server using the software agent technology which integrates an MSN Autoresponder, an authority manager, a moving objects detector and a streaming media encoder into a powerful PC to implement the auto-reply, the authority, the active alert and the remote monitoring functions. By using the remote video surveillance and MSN communication technologies, the remote clients can monitor the cameras. The location of the remote clients may be anywhere in the world, provided that there is an MSN Messenger. Keywords – MSN, Monitoring system, Remote monitoring, Moving object detection, Smart server, Security.
I. INTRODUCTION Monitoring systems are now common additions to many homes and businesses for security. More recently, more intelligent monitoring systems have been described which employ moving object detection using hardware and software [1]. Lately many products in the monitoring systems have been produced, but their design based on the industrial computers [2]. With them, there is not only much difficulty with system installation, but there are also some disadvantageous effects regarding stability and reliability. A monitoring system should be remotely controllable. With the development of modern electrical technology, monitoring also is developing from analog to digital [3] [4]. With the spread of the Internet it has become easier than ever to construct the large-scale remote video surveillance system which can closely watch individually a specific area through one or more cameras [5]. However, while monitoring systems based on remote video surveillance are able to monitor premises remotely, the user of the traditional system needs to activate the remote console from time to time to view what is happing on the monitored premises. Windows Messenger was introduced with the release of Windows XP and is installed and enabled by default. It has a variety of features, such as instant messaging, presence, file transfer, application sharing and white boarding. Later versions added “ink” support and integration with a Live Communication Server. Windows Messenger can be integrated with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook,
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Microsoft Outlook Express, and the remote assistance feature of Windows XP, as well as with Media Center in Windows XP Media Center Edition. It can communicate with the Exchange Server 2000 Instant Messaging Service and the .NET Messenger Service [6]. Software agent technology has been developed in recent years, and the software agents have a big share in various kinds of work which needs a lot of manpower. What is more, they can be employed for something more important, such as gathering statistic results [7]. At the same time MSN communication has become a popular way of communication. In 2006 more than 28 million users worldwide used an MSN Messenger to communicate over the MSN network. The MSN Messenger allows a user to send instant messages or live video to another [8]. If the client logs into MSN, the message will be still sent to the client. It is faster than e-mail, more discreet than a phone call, and best of all-it's free. Motion detection is a well-studied problem in computer vision. There are two types of approaches: the region-based approach and the boundary-based approach. The most popular region-based approaches are background subtraction and optical flow. Background subtraction detects moving objects by subtracting estimated background models from images. This method is sensitive to illumination changes and small movement in the background [9]. By using a software agent, remote video surveillance and the MSN communication technology, a real-time MSN monitoring system with moving object detection has now been developed and is described in this paper. An overview of our real-time MSN monitoring system is shown in Fig. 1. The system consists of three blocks: the cameras, the smart server and the remote clients. The several cameras are connected to a smart server to watch the monitored environment. The smart server can handle the progress of connections, including delivering video contents to the user and gathering all monitoring information and results. It also has the ability to detect a moving object on the monitored premises and to access the remote clients to create real-time communication with the live video using the MSN Messenger to monitor the premises. Moreover, our system has the following merits: It enhances the number of client connections, lowers the workload and is not restricted by time and place.
credentials used to identify, authenticate and authorize access to the MSN monitoring system. The security manager provides a powerful mass management tool for the automated and remote management. The tool provides a single view of all services on all managed systems, allowing administrators to report on and change virtually all service properties with a few mouse clicks, as shown in Fig. 3. The remote clients can then start a regular instant message session from a remote computer or PDA and send simple text commands as a request to monitor the premises. The MSN Autoresponder receives and auto-replies to the instant message according to the configurations made by the manager beforehand. The moving object detector, which is designed for security purposes, allows the connected cameras to watch for object movement and to record when they detect movement. These recordings can be saved to the database and send an alert message via MSN to the remote clients. Then the smart server enables the remote clients to monitor and access cameras remotely using the MSN Messenger.
Fig. 1. The block diagram of the real-time MSN monitoring system.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the smart server. Section III describes the detection of moving objects. Section 4 summarizes the evaluation results, and the final Section presents our conclusions. II. SMART SERVER DESIGN The smart server has a 2.8-GHz Intel Pentium-4 with an HT Technology Processor, 1-GB RAM, a 160-GB hard disk and a Gigabit Ethernet network adapter. We have designed the MSN monitoring server software of the smart server using Visual Studio 2005 which supports the Graphic User Interface (GUI), thus allowing the manager to easily control and adjust the smart server’s configurations, as shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 3. The security manager manages and controls client accounts and passwords.
Table 1 shows all possible commands that can be sent via the MSN with a brief description of the command functions. The current readings of information monitored by the smart server can be requested at any time by simply sending an MSN message containing the desired command to the smart server. Table 1. Remote control commands.
Fig. 2. The structure diagram of the smart server.
We have used the Windows Media Services 9 Series to configure and manage the streaming media contents delivered to the remote clients. The MSN monitoring server software uses the software agent technology to put some suitable dialogs into the process of monitoring to make the whole procedure more complete, and the remote client doesn’t feel as if the conversation resembles conversing with a machine. This security manager defines the policy required to securely deploy, manage and control user accounts and passwords. Accounts and passwords are the primary security
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Command LOGIN
Parameter password
OPENC CLCAM SAVEC
Camera index Camera index filename
STOPS STREA CLSTR
x dpi x
Function Client log into server with password Starts camera Closes camera Captures camera image and saves to filename.wmv Stops capturing image to file Starts streaming media Closes streaming media
The following auto-reply messages are used to reply to the requests from the client for showing information of the smart server, such as login success, server overloading and moving object warning, as shown in Table 2.
!"#!
1"#!&)%#7%#& /+8*,&9 : $/*%,!&'#%"!%)&'("!& )%))*+,&=*!(&)1"#!& )%#7%#
Table 2. Autoreply messages of smart server.
Smart server auto reply messages Login success Login error Camera has opened Camera has closed Report media streaming address Media streaming has been closed Reset media streaming Moving object warning
Message description
Capture camera
Welcome! , this smart server speaking Client name or password error! Cam open Cam closed streaming link is mms://:
0)&'/*%,!&."))=+#-& '+##%'!2 Security Yes manager
Building new image Yes Image subtract
Streaming closed Server overloading, please waiting for reset! Moving object warning!
Thresholding
0)& '+11",-& '+##%'!2
Start monitoring
34%'5!%& '+11",-
Changes over default value?
$(",8%& ."#"1%#%#) ?5*/-*,8& 1%-*"&)!#%"1
Filter
Yes
No
!+#%&7*-%+ Moving object Warning
Estimate illumination changes
Fig. 4 shows the control flow chart of the smart server. After the MSN monitoring server software is initiated on the smart server, the security manager selects the clients from the buddy list of those who are allowed both to connect to the smart server and to access the cameras.
III.
Moving object detector
$(%'>&-"!"& ",-& '+11",-
System controller
No Building new background model
DETECTION OF MOVING OBJECTS
Detecting of moving object is strongly demanded for various applications. There are several systems commercially available, most of which are based on subtraction between consecutive frames or between a current image and a stored background image. They can work as expected where environmental conditions do not change, such as indoors. Usually high resolution gray-scale images must be processed, and since each image pixel may belong to a moving object, pixel-wise processing is required, which gives an impressive computational burden. On the other hand the gray-level intensity of moving objects varies greatly with the lighting conditions, and the images are usually cluttered and noisy, so moving objects could be almost undistinguishable from the background. Finally, real-time operation is needed in most applications. A promising alternative approach to overcome these difficulties is Gaussian filter method. A Gaussian filter is designed to give no overshoot to a step function input while maximizing the rise and fall time. This behavior is closely connected to the fact that the Gaussian filter has the minimum possible group delay [10]. The weights of the Gaussian 5x5 filter are defined as below. Conventionally these weights are to be multiplied by pixels surrounding the central pixel, and this sum is normalized by dividing it by the sum of the weights.
0)&'("!& )%))*+,& %4*)!2 No $#%"!%&'("!& )%))*+,&",#%.+#!&!+& '/*%,!
MSN autoresponder Yes
;5!+&#%./
