Sensor configuration for coverage optimization for surveillance applications
Firdaus Janoos, Raghu Machiraju, Richard E. Parent, James W. Davis, Alan T. Murray · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
In any surveillance or remote monitoring system, the location and configuration/orientation of directed optical sensors is critical for efficient resource utilization as well as correct system behavior. In this paper we introduce a method to determine the set of configurations (pan-tilt-zoom) for a system of cameras in a given a 3D environment with well-characterized human activity. The mainstay of our method is a metric that measures the ground plane coverage by a sensor. Our goal is to seek configurations that provide maximal coverage of areas in a scene that have been deemed important or have intense human activity. Our method was deployed on a portion large urban campus covering a region with multiple buildings, sidewalks, trees and other occluding objects. We built a 3D CAD model of the environment and tested our method on a system of six pan-tilt-zoom cameras. We used activity information gathered from surveillance of the environment to determine the coverage requirements. The resulting sensor configurations satisfied the real-world security and surveillance concerns of the environment.