A chaotic motion controller for camera networks

Camera networks are widely applied in surveillance and monitoring applications. Unlike other omni-directional sensors, cameras are directional sensors with limited field of views (FoVs). Such characteristics impose extra challenges in camera networks design. Comparing with ordinary sensors, cameras are relatively expensive. It is impractical to fully cover a space by using a large number of static cameras. The sensing coverage of a camera can be largely extended by mounting the camera on a rotator. However, such attempt is compromising the detection ability of a network as an attacker may breach the network by determining the rotating patterns of the cameras. A random-like rotating pattern can protect a camera network from such attack. In this paper, a chaotic motion controller for camera networks is proposed. The controller introduces random-like chaotic patterns to cooperate multiple cameras. Simulation results show that networks governed by the proposed motion controller can obtain higher coverage rate and coverage ratio than networks with random-based controller. Further improvement can be achieved by turning some parameters.