A Method For Cost Effective And Efficient Bandwidth Adaptive Transferring /Recording Sensory Data From Single Or Multiple Data Sources To Network Accessible Storage Devices.
A Method For Cost Effective And Efficient Bandwidth Adaptive Transferring /Recording Sensory Data From Single Or Multiple Data Sources To Network Accessible Storage Devices.
Abstract:
A method is disclosed for cost-effective and efficient bandwidth adaptive transferring
/recording sensory data from single or multiple data sources to network accessible
storage devices. More particularly, the invention is directed to a fault tolerant and
efficient method for recording sensory data including video as received from a single
or multiple number of data sources like Cameras to network accessible storage
devices, estimation of optimal required bandwidth for individual data channels taking
into consideration the data download speed from data source to server along with the
availability of network bandwidth at any given point of time, efficient network
bandwidth sharing amongst the data channels for uploading data to storage devices
over network.
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Notices, Deadlines & Correspondence
E-375 BAISHNABGHATA - PATULI TOWNSHIP,
KOLKATA - 700091,
WEST BENGAL, INDIA
2. BHATTACHARYYA, DIPAK
16/839 KISHORI BAGAN MEARBER PIRTALA,
P.O.: CHINSURAH, DIST.:HOOGHLY,
PIN: 712101 WEST BENGAL, INDIA.
3. BOSE, TUHIN
BE-1/14/1, PEYARA BAGAN
DESHBANDHU NAGAR, CITY:KOLKATA,
PIN: 700 059, WEST BENGAL, INDIA
4. DALAL, TUTAI KUMAR
KHIRPAI - HATTALA (WD - 4),
DIST: PASCHIM MEDINIPUR,
PIN: 721232, WEST BENGAL, INDIA.
5. DAS, SAWAN
16 GREEN VIEW, GARIA,
CITY: KOLKATA, PIN: 700084,
WEST BENGAL, INDIA.
6. DHAR, SOUMYADEEP
PURBAYAN APPARTMENT,
TARASANKAAR ROAD BY LANE,
DESBANDHU PARA, P.O.: SILIGURI,
DIST: DARJEELING, PIN: 734404,
WEST BENGAL, INDIA.
7. MAITY, SOUMYADIP
VILL & PO: DUMARDARI,
PIN: 721425, PURBA MEDINIPUR,
WEST BENGAL, INDIA
Specification
Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a method for cost-effective and efficient
bandwidth adaptive transferring/recording sensory data from single or multiple data
sources to network accessible storage devices. More particularly, the invention is a
fault tolerant and efficient method for recording sensory data including video as
received from a single or multiple number of data sources like Cameras to network
accessible storage devices, estimation of optimal required bandwidth for individual
data channels taking into consideration the data download speed from data source to
server along with the availability of network bandwidth at any given point of time,
efficient network bandwidth sharing amongst the data channels for uploading data to
storage devices over network.
Background of the Invention
Video Management Systems are used for video data acquisition and search processes
using single or multiple servers. They are often loosely coupled with one or more
separate systems for performing operations on the acquired video data such as
analyzing the video content, etc. Servers can record different types of data in storage
media, and the storage media can be directly attached to the servers or accessed
over IP network. This demands a significant amount of network bandwidth to receive
data from the sensors (e.g, Cameras) and to concurrently transfer or upload the data
in the storage media. Due to high demand in bandwidth to perform such tasks,
especially for video data, often separate high speed network are dedicated to transfer
data to storage media. Dedicated high speed network is costly and often require
costly storage devices as well. Often this is overkill for low or moderately priced
installations.
It is also known that to back up against server failures, one or more dedicated fail-
over (sometimes called mirror) servers are often deployed in prior art. Dedicated fail-
over servers remain unused during normal operations and hence resulting in wastage
of such costly resources. Also, a central server process either installed in the failover
server or in a central server is required to initiate the back-up service, in case a
server stops operating. This strategy does not avoid a single point of failure.
Moreover, when the servers and clients reside over different ends in an internet and
the connectivity suffers from low or widely varying bandwidth, transmission of multi-
channel data from one point to another becomes a challenge. Data aggregation
techniques are often applied in such cases which are computationally intensive or
suffer from inter-channel interference, particularly for video, audio or other types of
multimedia data.
As regards analytic servers presently in use it is well known that there are many
video analytics system in the prior art. Video content analysis is often done per frame
basis which is mostly pre defined which make such systems lacking in desired
efficiency of analytics but are also unnecessarily cost extensive with unwanted loss of
valuable computing resources.
Added to the above, in case of presently available techniques of video analysis ,cases
of unacceptable number of false alarms are reported when the content analysis
systems are deployed in a noisy environment for generating alerts in real time. This
is because the traditional methods are not automatically adaptive to demography
specific environmental conditions, varying illumination levels, varying behavioural
and movement patterns of the moving objects in a scene, changes of appearance of
colour in varying lighting conditions, changes of appearance of colours in global or
regional illumination intensity and type of illumination, and similar other factors.
It has therefore been a challenge to identify the appearance of a non-moving foreign
object (static object) in a scene in presence of other moving objects, where the
moving objects occasionally occlude the static object. Detection accuracy suffers in
various degrees under different demographic conditions.
Extraction of particular types of objects (e.g. face of a person, but not limited to) in
images based on fiduciary points is a known technique. However, computational
requirement is often too high for traditional classifier used for this purpose in the
prior art, e.g., Haar classifier.
Also, in a distributed system where multiple sites with independent administrative
controls are present, unification of those systems through a central monitoring
station may be required at any later point of time. This necessitates hardware and OS
independence in addition to the backward compatibility of the underlying
computational infrastructure components, and the software architecture should
accommodate such amalgamation as well.
It would be thus clearly apparent from the above state of the art that there is need
for advancement in the art of sensory input/data such as video acquisition cum
recording and /or analytics of such sensory inputs/data such as video feed adapted to
facilitate fail-safe integration and /or optimized utilization of various sensory inputs
for various utility applications including event/alert generation, recording and related
aspects.
Video Management System using IP enabled video capturing devices (Cameras etc)
has become an integral part of Surveillance industry today. A basic requirement of
this type of systems is to input compressed video streams from multiple cameras and
record the video in storage devices. In the earlier days when DVR and then NVR were
predominant components, the complexity and hence the challenges for efficient
deployment of the system were less. This is because each DVR or NVR was a
standalone system taking feed from a handful of cameras (typically 16 or 32), and
used their dedicated local storage devices to record the video. However, when the
number of cameras started to increase beyond 100, and typically to a few hundreds,
and the users demanded a unified system to record, view and search video from
these hundreds of cameras efficiently, Video Management System emerged as a
solution. In a typical Video Management System there are multiple servers, each
catering a set of Video Capture devices (e.g., Cameras), one or more network
accessible RAID configured storage devices, and multiple workstations. Each server
now needs to handle 64 or more cameras, stream the video from the cameras to the
client machines.
In a Video Management Server system, there is a requirement for an efficient
Network bandwidth management, so that all the network bandwidth hungry tasks
assigned to the servers, viz, grabbing video from IP- cameras, uploading video to
Network accessible storage devices and streaming the video channels to the Clients
on demand, are executed in an optimal way. Also, the system must be fault tolerant
so that intermittent failure of the Network connectivity from the Server to the
Network accessible storage devices does not result loss of video in the storage. All
these activities should happen automatically without any user interaction. Due to
high demand in bandwidth to perform such tasks, especially for video data, often
separate high speed network are dedicated to transfer data to storage media.
Dedicated high speed network is costly and often require costly storage devices as
well. Often this is a overkill for low or moderately priced installations. However there
has hardly been any choice because no effective strategy for network bandwidth
sharing among multiple concurrent processes in a single server could be devised in
traditional systems, particularly in a situation when the data sources stream data at
variable bit rates, with prior art.
The challenge here is to make the system efficient with respect to all the tasks
mentioned above. Traditionally, systems are proposed where redundancy in terms of
multiple network paths from storage devices to servers, very high speed storage
network and redundant recording and streaming servers are used to cater to such
problems. This incurs high cost and non-optimal use of the resources, as a sizable
portion of the resource is underutilized or non-utilized under normal scenario.
Objects of the Invention
It is thus the basic object of the present invention to provide for a method for cost-
effective and efficient transferring /recording sensory data from single or multiple
data sources to network accessible storage devices.
Another object is to propose a method for efficient transferring /recording sensory
data which would be unique as it would handles all the above tasks in an efficient
way, with optimal use of the resources (Network, Storage space), even using a
decent server having only one Network interface card.
A further object of the present invention is directed to advancements in method
adapted for intelligently sharing the computing resource, storage, rendering devices
and communication bandwidth among different processes of the system to execute
the above mentioned tasks with limited resources.
Another object of the present invention is directed to advancements in method
discussed above by interconnecting a number of intelligent components consisting of
hardware and software, and involving implementation techniques adapted to make
the system efficient, scalable, cost effective, fail-safe, adaptive to various
demographic conditions, adaptive to various computing and communication
infrastructural facilities.
Summary of the Invention
Thus according to the basic aspect of the present invention there is provided
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided a method for cost-
effective and efficient transferring /recording sensory data from single or multiple
data sources to network accessible storage devices comprising:
atleast one sensory data recording server adapted to record inputs from single
/multiple data sources in atleast one local storage space with the URL of the files
stored in database;
transferring the thus stored files from said local storage to a network based central
storage provided for accessing the files for end use/applications,
said transfer of sensory data from source to the central storage via said local storage
being carried out taking into consideration the data download speed(inflow rate) from
data source to server along with the availability of network bandwidth at any given
point of time for efficient network bandwidth sharing amongst multiple data sources
to said storage device in the network.
In the above method wherein said sensory data recording server is adapted to
monitor available total network bandwidth and per channel inflow rate and based
thereon decide rate of per channel video transfer from the server local storage to said
central storage.
In the above method wherein sensory data from the source are recorded in the form
of variable length clips wherein the clip duration is set by the user or set by the
server itself.
In the above method comprising the step of determining the optimal bit rate for
uploading sensory inputs comprising the following steps:
(a) calculating the average bit rate for each channel separately in periodic intervals
wherein the sensory input streaming rate (DO of a particular source/camera (Q)
camera to the server is estimated and (b) identifying the available network
bandwidth (B) at that instant from the system; and finally (c ) calculating the
frequency of Clip upload for channel, based on :
where 0