University of California Transportation Center

In this article, we present the Contextual Activity-Notification Visualization Analysis System (Canvas), which is used to develop advanced monitoring techniques, integrate cameras installed around the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) campus and centralize information. Our work focuses on building an upgradeable framework for simple user interaction through an accessible visualization. Rather than present a user with raw sensor data from the physical world, we introduce visualization layers to abstract the internals of monitoring algorithms and provide a clean consumable computational output. Canvas provides a flexible backbone that lets us improve vision algorithms while providing a seamless visualization interface. This ultimately improves the effectiveness of the monitoring by focusing attention and presenting only the most relevant information. The visualization is built on Web technology to make the information available anywhere, anytime.