METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR EFFICIENT SAMPLING OF VIDEOS USING SPATIOTEMPORAL CONSTRAINTS FOR STATISTICAL BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

The present invention is a method and system for selecting and storing videos by applying semantically-meaningful selection criteria to the track sequences of the trips made by people in an area covered by overlapping multiple cameras. The present invention captures video streams of the people in the area by multiple cameras and tracks the people in each of the video streams, producing track sequences in each video stream. The present invention determines a first set of video segments that contains the trip information of the people, and compacts each of the video streams by removing a second set of video segments that do not contain the trip information of the people from each of the video streams. The present invention selects video segments from the first set of video segments based on predefined selection criteria for the statistical behavior analysis. The stored video data is an efficient compact format of video segments that contain the track sequences of the people and selected according to semantically-meaningful and domain-specific selection criteria. The final storage format of the videos is a trip-centered format, which sequences videos from across multiple cameras, and it can be used to facilitate multiple applications dealing with behavior analysis in a specific domain.