Automated camera layout to satisfy task-specific and floor plan-specific coverage requirements

In many multi-camera vision systems the effect of camera locations on the task-specific quality of service is ignored. Researchers in Computational Geometry have proposed elegant solutions for some sensor location problem classes. Unfortunately, these solutions use unrealistic assumptions about the cameras' capabilities that make these algorithms unsuitable for many real world computer vision applications. In this paper, the general camera placement problem is first defined with assumptions that are more consistent with the capabilities of real world cameras. The region to be observed by cameras may be volumetric, static or dynamic, and may include holes. A subclass of this general problem can be formulated in terms of planar regions that are typical of building floor plans. Given a floor plan to be observed, the problem is then to reliably compute a camera layout such that certain task-specific constraints are met. A solution to this problem is obtained via binary optimization over a discrete problem space. In experiments the performance of the resulting system is demonstrated with different real indoor and outdoor floor plans. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.