Abstract:

Most sensors or cameras discussed in the sensor network community are usually 3D homogeneous, even though their 2D coverage areas in the ground plane are heterogeneous. Meanwhile, observed objects of camera networks are usually simplified as 2D points in previous literature. However in actual application scenes, not only cameras are always heterogeneous with different height and action radiuses, but also the observed objects are with 3D features (i.e., height). This paper presents a sensor planning formulation addressing the efficiency enhancement of visual tracking in 3D heterogeneous camera networks that track and detect people traversing a region. The problem of sensor planning consists of three issues: (i) how to model the 3D heterogeneous cameras; (ii) how to rank the visibility, which ensures that the object of interest is visible in a camera’s field of view; (iii) how to reconfigure the 3D viewing orientations of the cameras. This paper studies the geometric properties of 3D heterogeneous camera networks and addresses an evaluation formulation to rank the visibility of observed objects. Then a sensor planning method is proposed to improve the efficiency of visual tracking. Finally, the numerical results show that the proposed method can improve the tracking performance of the system compared to the conventional strategies.