Automatic multi-camera placement and optimisation using ray tracing

An automatic method for rapid and optimised surveillance camera deployment is proposed for outdoor settings. Given a target scene. potential camera locations are generated taking account of real-world camera parameters and environmental constraints. For example, each point on a target must be viewed by at least two cameras. We employ ray tracing to determine the visibility of any point from a given camera and camera-to-point viewing angle is used to measure visibility quality. Gradient ascent is used to optimise camera orientation for maximum quality coverage. Camera network optimisation was also addressed, and a new combinatorial algorithm is proposed. A comparative study showed that our approach significantly outperforms competing techniques providing solutions which better cover the search space, while offering multiple alternative solutions.