Distributed three-dimensional camera alignment in highly-dynamical prioritized observation areas

Video surveillance of large areas has become a necessary safety procedure. With an increase of these areas and an accompanying increasing number of cameras, manual configuration becomes infeasible. This paper describes a way to automate this task by distributing it among the smart camera nodes. The main objective is an overlap-free monitoring of the observation area, considering the distinct priority of an area element. Due to a time-dependable priority the observation quality will increase in contrast to static priorities. The cameras only use local knowledge and single-hop communication. Each camera optimizes its local field-of-view according to a specified quality function. It is shown that the developed algorithm scales well to large smart-camera systems.