Coverage Control for PTZ Camera Networks Using Scene Potential Map

Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera networks are pervasive in many applications, such as video surveillance, sports analysis and epidemic prevention. However, it is difficult to control several PTZ cameras observing a large scene due to the high complexity of PTZ camera networks. This problem, called the coverage control for PTZ cameras, draws broad attention of researchers. Virtual potential field (VPF) can enhance the coverage performance and reduce the overlap region of cameras, but it does not fully take the actual scenario into account. In this work, we introduce scene potential map (SPM) to the VPF method, investigating both the scene and the task in the optimization. The proposed scene potential map characterizes the importance of target region and evaluates the perception quality of PTZ camera. Then we propose a novel virtual force analysis method to optimalize poses of the PTZ camera network. We also develop a region partition method based on the perception quality measure to divide the target region and achieve better zoom level, realizing an excellent coverage performance of PTZ camera networks. Finally, the evaluation experiments clearly demonstrated that our proposed coverage control scheme can achieve remarkably better performance than state-of-the-arts.