A calibration algorithm for multi-camera visual surveillance systems based on single-view metrology

Abstract

The growing concerns about persons security and the increasing popularity of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras, have been raising the interest on automated master-slave surveillance systems. Such systems are typically composed by (1) a fixed wide-angle camera that covers a large area, detects and tracks moving objects in the scene; and (2) a PTZ camera, that provides a close-up view of an object of interest. Previously published approaches attempted to establish 2D correspondences between the video streams of both cameras, which is a ill-posed formulation due to the absence of depth information. On the other side, 3D-based approaches are more accurate but require more than one fixed camera to estimate depth information. In this paper, we describe a novel method for easy and precise calibration of a master-slave surveillance system, composed by a single fixed wide-angle camera. Our method exploits single view metrology to infer 3D data of the tracked humans and to selfperform the transformation between camera views. Experimental results in both simulated and realistic scenes point for the effectiveness of the proposed model in comparison with the state-of-the-art.