Active-Vision for the Autonomous Surveillance of Dynamic, Multi-Object Environments

This paper presents a novel method for the coordinated selection and positioning of groups of active-vision cameras for the autonomous surveillance of an object-of-interest as it travels through a multi-object workspace with an a priori unknown trajectory. Several approaches have been previously proposed to address the problem of sensor selection and control. However, these have primarily relied on off-line planning methods and only infrequently utilized on-line planning to compensate for unexpected variations in a target’s trajectory. The method proposed in this paper, on the other hand, uses a real-time dispatching algorithm, which eliminates the need for any a priori knowledge of the target’s trajectory and, thus, is robust to unexpected variations in the environment. Experiments have shown that the use of dynamic sensors along with a dispatching algorithm can tangibly improve the performance of an active-surveillance system.