This paper presents an object-aware video surveillance system that is not only smart and friendly for users, but allows for transmission of the scene over limited bandwidth networks. The proposed system stores high-quality video data and associated object metadata, which includes ROI (region-of-interest) information. To satisfy bandwidth constraints and display important parts of the images fast and precisely, the stored images are efficiently transcoded in the compressed-domain based on the ROI information. At the receiver, effective display methods such as a mosaic style allow for an intuitive understanding of the important objects in the scene, as well as their movement over time