Fusion of Omnidirectional and PTZ Cameras for Accurate Cooperative Tracking

Dual camera systems (omnidirectional and slaved PTZ cameras) are widely used in public area monitoring and target tracking. However, due to their low and non-uniform resolution, omnidirectional cameras are only able to provide moderate accuracy in both motion/target detection and tracking. To overcome this disadvantage, two methods are proposed: geometry mapping based on a polynomial imaging model and closed loop cooperative tracking. Using a unified polynomial approximation [1], the geometry relationship between the omnidirectional and PTZ cameras can be formulated in a general solution from camera calibration with a fully automated model selection. Distributed Kalman filters are developed to exchange estimated trajectories among cameras forming closed loop sub-systems for individual cameras. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is illustrated via experiments and comparisons with existing systems.