Recent Advances in Camera Planning for Large Area Surveillance

With recent advances in consumer electronics and the increasingly urgent need for public security, camera networks have evolved from their early role of providing simple and static monitoring to current complex systems capable of obtaining extensive video information for intelligent processing, such as target localization, identification, and tracking. In all cases, it is of vital importance that the optimal camera configuration (i.e., optimal location, orientation, etc.) is determined before cameras are deployed as a suboptimal placement solution will adversely affect intelligent video surveillance and video analytic algorithms. The optimal configuration may also provide substantial savings on the total number of cameras required to achieve the same level of utility. In this article, we examine most, if not all, of the recent approaches (post 2000) addressing camera placement in a structured manner. We believe that our work can serve as a first point of entry for readers wishing to start researching into this area or engineers who need to design a camera system in practice. To this end, we attempt to provide a complete study of relevant formulation strategies and brief introductions to most commonly used optimization techniques by researchers in this field. We hope our work to be inspirational to spark new ideas in the field.