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The Mobile Video Surveillance System Based On Wireless LAN

Chunhua Wang Zheng Mao Yu Zhang Hailong Luo

College of Electronic Information & Control Engineering

Beijing University of Technology

Beijing, PRC 100022 springwang@emails.bjut.edu.cn

Abstract
This paper proposes a design scheme of mobile video surveillance system based on wireless LAN (WLAN), the overall system architecture and key technologies introduced. The operating principle, process and realization of several modules are described in detail, such as video capturing, video reproducing, video wireless transmitting, video playing on the mobile terminals PDA, etc. transmission in the way of from one point to many. Keywords: Wireless LAN; Video surveillance; Video data transmission; IP multicast IP multicast and MPEG-4 codec techniques are used too, so the system can realize real-time video

Introduction

With the continuously development of the intelligent community, the communitys supervision and services based on electron, information and network technologies will be gradually improved and the safety and protection system of the community is an indispensable part. constantly in the center monitoring station. surveillance. But the conventional secure surveillance Wireless systems are all in the form of cable television, so the security personnel must observe the environment That brings to much inconvenience. communication technologies provide the flexibility and mobility requirements essential for future The advance of wireless network technology will make wireless LAN (WLAN) applied The paper proposes a design scheme of mobile video surveillance system widely in the field of safety.

based on WLAN, surveillance personnel via mobile terminal Pocket PC or PDA-like devices could observe one or more sites everywhere in the WLAN coverage, at the same time he could control the camera

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devices move and focus to chose and orient key observing object and range. improved.

In this way security

personnel could rush to the accident site in time, thus the surveillance strength and work efficiency both are

Overall System Architecture

The system could transmit the original image to the main control server which is in the central monitoring station over wire cable or wireless. The system adopts client/server mode, the client is mobile terminals Pocket PC or PDA, which could connect with the WLAN over the wireless access point (short for AP). The AP can also connect with Switch or Router so as to join into the LAN or Internet, and the PCs could observe monitory points, too. The system mainly includes the camera devices, the main control server, WLAN, mobile terminal devices, etc. Figure 1 illustrates the overall system architecture for the video surveillance system, which consists of the following hardware components.

Figure 1: Overall mobile video surveillance system architecture 2.1 Camera Devices Every monitory point is a camera with a cradle head, which make the camera could move in the range of horizontal 360 degree and vertical 90 degree, so it monitors in multi-direction, at the same time it could zoom in or zoom out so as to fast orient the fixed target and to monitor larger scale surveillance environment. In addition, because the system architecture is highly modularized, there is no restriction on the number of cameras used, their brand names, or their capability. 2.2 Main Control Server The main control server is the device to realize videos control, storage and surveillance, at the monitoring center it could real-time observe every monitory point. The main control server is only an ordinary

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computer installed a wireless network card. It can complete video playing, coding, storing, inquiring and reproducing, at the same time transmitting video stream to mobile terminals, receiving control signal, and controlling the cradle head. 2.3 Monitoring Terminals The monitoring terminals could be Pocket PC, PDA-like devices which WLAN enabled. and remotely control of the camera and cradle head. 2.4 The Component of the WLAN The main control server and PDA-like Monitoring terminals are all installed a wireless network card, so as to consist the WLAN with one or more wireless AP which is the center of WLAN. 802.11b standard, its transmitting speed could as high as 108Mbps. In this work, the system chose TP-LINK s wireless AP, which based on IEEE 802.11g standard and compatible with IEEE Using antenna for WLAN or many APs could expand the coverage of WLAN to enlarge the surveillances systems scope. The mobile terminals could realize monitoring the monitory sites anytime and anywhere within the WLAN coverage as long as it land the main control server. Over wireless

AP it connects with the server, so as to complete the video datas real-time receiving, decoding, reproducing,

Realization of the mobile video surveillance system WLAN-based

3.1 Video Capture Module The module adopts the software package of Video for Windows (short for VFW), which possess the function of converting the primitive video data sourced by a surveillances camera to digital video data. VFW is a software package about digital video presented by Microsoft Company in 1992, which could easily digitize the application program and play the video frequency gained from conventional analog video devices. The module is developed based on Visual C++ environment, mainly applying VFWs window class AVICap, which has many good features in the aspect of video capture. Using AVICap it could access video buffer dont need any intermediate file, so it possesses the quality of high real time and efficiency. At the same time it also could complete capture the video data to files. Therefore, VFW The system could realize digital video streams capturing, playing, storing, and some related operations.

using the call-back functions could gain digital video data from buffer directly, then the coded video data could transmitted in WLAN environment, which meets the require of real-time video data transmission. 3.2 Video Encoding and Transmitting In order to make sure the video stream could be transmitted smoothly, the bandwidth of the network appeared extremely important. In addition, the requirements of bandwidth for different kind of video files IEEE802.11b/g/a defined the bandwidth of of various coding standards are diverse from each other.

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WLAN is 11Mbps/22Mbps/54Mbps, and their available bandwidth is 5Mbps/10Mbps/22Mbps, that could realize several video files transmitted at the same time and ensure high quality video. An image of 176*144 24 bits with 30 frames per second, the video size of bit number will be 176*144*24*30=18.2Mbps. Obviously the raw video data is very large and not fit for transmitting directly, so it must be compressed. Various coding standards developed and standardized have their pros and cons and are used for different applications. MPEG-4 is a developing standard which targets and provides much functionality, such as the support of content-based communication, access and manipulation of digital objects that are not covered by the previous standards, especially for the emerging wireless multimedia applications. It provides high compression ratio suitable for real-time video transmission in very low bit rates. Many coding profiles have been defined and more is expected to be included in this standard, this feature provides the flexibility for wide range of applications. In addition, Error resilience and error concealment techniques are offered by the MPEG-4 standard for wireless applications. The system adopts the MPEG-4 standard to encode the original video stream and the encoded video stream is less than 200Kbps which could be transmitted 100 routes at the same time over a 22Mbps, 802.11g WLAN in an ideal case. Thus the system can achieve the practical requirement entirely. 3.3 Network Transport Protocols The system adopts TCP/IP network transport protocols. According to OSI 7layer network standard, in the Connection-oriented TCP provides layering model of TCP/ IP, the transport layer above IP layer includes two transport protocols, namely TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol). reliable stream service, while no connection-oriented UDP provides uncertainly datagram service. Therefore based on the feature of various data transport, both TCP and UDP are applied. The transmission of the control signal adopts TCP protocol to ensure reliability, while for the MPEG-4 compressed video data using UDP protocol aimed to ensure its transmission efficiency, additionally UDP sustain IP multicast. We could use Winsock which supports TCP and UDP protocols to program, so as to realize video stream and control data real- time transmitting. 3.4 IP Multicast The system supports IP multicast, which is a kind of deformation of broadcast and also adopts the transmitting form of one site to many sites. Whats more, multicast doesnt sent information to every user Namely IP multicast in the network, it only sends the information to the user who interested in, so one transmission could complete that the transmitter sent information to a group receivers at the same time. dynamically, so every site can join or quit dynamically. is the form of sending data to a group IP sites in the network and the group of IP sites was composed The mobile terminals PDA could choose to join or quit the surveillance system according to actual demand. Applying IP multicast reduces not only network traffic, but server load as well and avoids the network resource waste. The advantage of the technology is if the network is large, the main control server could

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send multi-channel video stream to multi user, thus many PDA terminals can monitor at the same time. The system realizes the requirement of real-time surveillance of multi-monitory site and multi-terminal. 3.5 Transmit and Receive of the Control Signals The control signals aimed to control the cradle head so as to realize omni-direction and flexibly observing the monitory sites. The mobile terminal-PDA sends control signal over TCP protocol to the main control The control server which according to the signal received sends command to control the cradle head. low 4 bits is action code.

signal adopts 8 bits format, which high 4 bits is address code namely to switch different cameras video and In addition, the system could connect 16 cameras following the address code of 0000 to 1111, which also can be expanded according to actual demand to include more camera devices. The action code describes the cradle heads moving and focusing, Table 1 shows the cameras actions according to different action codes. Table 1: The coding format of control signal Action code 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 Cameras action Up Down Left Right Self-motion Focus+ FocusAperture+ Action code 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111 Cameras action ApertureZoom out Zoom in Auto-focus Turn on Turn off Reserve Reserve

3.6 The Function Realization of Mobile Terminal PDA PDA handheld terminal devices are the crucial component of the system which could achieve real-time surveillance over WLAN ultimately and contacted with the security personnel directly. design of the mobile terminals software is extremely important. Therefore the In the work we choose the PDA as The application

terminal and it adopts Windows CE operating system which is a kind of embedded operation system and compared with the Windows for PC it regarded as a little, reliable, convenient Windows. and control abilities. PDAs working process is described as follows. First, it connects with the main control server over wireless AP and receives the video stream, using frame buffer technology to realize video streams real-time receiving and reproduction. Since the video data is compressed with MPEG-4 standard, it cant play directly, so must decoding to gain the original video data, then reproducing the image in the PDAs LCD screen. Applying buffer technology provides the advantages of effective program transfer, low system resource occupancy and stability which are available to real-time reproduce video. In the complete system the key component is video data processing both for the main control server and program is based on eMbedded Visual C++ development environment, which completes video reproduction

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mobile terminals.

Figure 2 shows the whole process of video data format from capturing to reproducing.
Camera Video signal Video stream Video reproduction

Video capture
Video stream Compressed video

MPEG4 decoding

MPEG4 encoding Compressed video Compressed video

Frame buffer

Data transmitting WLAN

Data receiving

Figure 2: The whole process of video data

Conclusion and future works

In this paper the video surveillance system we designed make it possible that security personnel who has a PDA could work wherever and whenever as long as in the WLAN area coverage. The system integrates MPEG-4, IP multicast and WLAN for multi-channel video streaming in community environment. The overall system structure has been detailed with its hardware and software components. With the advantage of cost-effective, easy installation, high flexibility, WLAN will be applied in wide range of fields. In more surveillance systems, the monitory sites and surveillance center will be connected wirelessly. Acknowledgment The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their suggestions that helped improve the quality of this paper. References
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