Patent ID: 7382244

Claim:
A video surveillance, storage, and alerting system, comprising: one or more surveillance cameras for capturing video data having attribute data, the attribute data representing importance of the surveillance cameras; one or more video analytics devices, adapted to process the video data from one or more of the surveillance cameras and to detect primitive video events in the video data; one or more audio sensory devices for capturing audio data having attribute data, the attribute data representing importance of the audio sensory devices; one or more audio analytics devices adapted to process the audio data from one or more of the audio sensory devices and to detect audio events in the audio data; a video tip module for receiving video tips from one or more external sources, adapted to extract meta-data and attribute data from the video tips and to generate tip events based on the extracted meta-data and attribute data, the attribute data representing the importance of the video tips; a hierarchy of two or more data storage devices for storing the video data from the surveillance cameras, the audio data from the audio sensory devices, and the video tips from the video tip module, the hierarchy of data storage devices connected to the surveillance cameras, the audio sensory devices, and the video tip module via a network; a hierarchical storage manager for managing storage and cascade of the video data, the audio data, and the video tips in the hierarchy of data storage devices based on the attribute data corresponding to the source of the video data, the audio data, and the video tips; a network management module for monitoring network status of the surveillance cameras, the audio sensory devices, and the data storage devices, the network management module adapted to generate network events reflective of the network status of all subsystems; a vehicle information module for retrieving information about a vehicle detected in the video data based on the detected vehicle's license plate, and adapted to generate vehicle events based on the information retrieved about the vehicle; a correlation engine for correlating two or more primitive events, the primitive events being one or more primitive video events from the video analytics devices weighted by the attribute data of the surveillance cameras used to capture the video data, audio events from the audio analytics devices weighted by the attribute data of the audio devices used to capture the audio data, tip events from the video tip module weighted by the extracted attribute data of the video tips, network events from the network management module weighted by attribute data of device corresponding to the network event, and vehicle events from the vehicle information module weighted by the information retrieved about the vehicle; and an alerting engine for generating one or more alerts and performing one or more actions based on the correlation performed by the correlation engine.