This paper presents an application for counting people through a single fixed camera. This system performs the count distinction between input and output of people moving through the supervised area. The counter requires two steps: detection and tracking. The detection is based on finding people's heads through preprocessed image correlation with several circular patterns. Tracking is made through the application of a Kalman filter to determine the trajectory of the candidates. Finally, the system updates the counters based on the direction of the trajectories. Different tests using a set of real video sequences taken from different indoor areas give results ranging between 87% and 98% accuracies depending on the volume of flow of people crossing the counting zone. Problematic situations, such as occlusions, people grouped in different ways, scene luminance changes, etc., were used to validate the performance of the system.

New processing methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning are replacing traditional computer vision algorithms. The more advanced systems can process huge amounts of data in large computing facilities. In contrast, this paper presents a smart video surveillance system executing AI algorithms in low power consumption embedded devices. The computer vision algorithm, typical for surveillance applications, aims to detect, count and track people’s movements in the area. This application requires a distributed smart camera system. The proposed AI application allows detecting people in the surveillance area using a MobileNet-SSD architecture. In addition, using a robust Kalman filter bank, the algorithm can keep track of people in the video also providing people counting information. The detection results are excellent considering the constraints imposed on the process. The selected architecture for the edge node is based on a UpSquared2 device that includes a vision processor unit (VPU) capable of accelerating the AI CNN inference. The results section provides information about the image processing time when multiple video cameras are connected to the same edge node, people detection precision and recall curves, and the energy consumption of the system. The discussion of results shows the usefulness of deploying this smart camera node throughout a distributed surveillance system.

A hardware solution is presented to obtain the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a real and symmetrical matrix using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Currently, this system is used to compute the eigenvalues and eigenvectors in covariance matrices for applications in digital image processing that make use of the principal component analysis (PCA) technique. The proposed solution in this paper is based on the Jacobi method, but in comparison with other related works, it presents a different architecture that remarkably improves execution time, while reducing the number of consumed resources of the FPGA.