View Planning of Multiple Active Cameras for Wide Area Surveillance

This paper describes a view planning of multiple cameras for tracking multiple persons for surveillance purposes. When only a few active cameras are used to cover a wide area, planning their views is an important issue in realizing a competent surveillance system. We develop a multi-start local search (MLS)-based planning method which iteratively selects fixation points of the cameras by which the expected number of tracked persons is maximized. Considering the fact that a person´s motion can be estimated with its intermittent observations, we set a criterion which encourages frequent shifts of fixation points and develop a procedure for generating promising initial solutions for MLS. The method is shown to outperform the other approaches. We then modify the method such that it dynamically divides the cameras into mutually independent groups and determines fixation points within each group. The modified method is comparable to the original one with a much lower planning cost.