We are currently developing a video surveillance system that monitors six cameras using computer vision techniques. The design of the system is that each firewire camera will feed into a video server. Three computers will then take video from the video server, two feeds per box, perform the processing, then feed the results to a final data-fusion computer.

As we have it just now, based on some older work, the video server sends the video to the processing boxes using a CORBA based system, but we are wondering if there are better technologies out there, especially with the wealth of internet streaming going on at the moment.

Basically, the question is, does anyone have much experience with streaming video over a network, in particular live video from cameras, and perhaps have a suggestion on good methods of streaming the data? (baring in mind that the image processing works on a frame-by-frame basis, and it is important that the frames are time-stamped in some way when they are initially recorded, such that the processing results can be re-combined based on the time stamp.) Our processing techniques are robust to a degree of video compression. Obviously, the nicest thing would be if anyone knows of a good streaming video server that meets our needs that could simply be plugged into our system.

You should take a look at Flumotion, which is a Free Software streaming server based on GStreamer.

It already has support for a range of devices, works completely distributed (every task that is part of a streaming server can be distributed to any machine in the network), is multi-format, and is easy to extend because components are written in Python.

Depending on what hardware you actually use, some development may be required. You can do this yourself or get it contracted out.

If you have any questions, you can mail the mailing list or contact the authors on IRC.

Good luck,
Thomas