Active Image Capturing and Dynamic Scene Visualization by Cooperative Distributed Vision

This paper addresses active image capturing and dynamic scene visualization by Cooperative Distributed Vision (CDV, in short). The concept of CDV was proposed by our five years project starting from 1996. From a practical point of view, the goal of CDV is summarized as follows: Embed in the real world a group of network-connected Observation Stations (real time video image processor with active camera(s)) and mobile robots with vision. And realize 1) wide-area dynamic scene understanding and 2) versatile scene visualization. Applications of CDV include real time wide-area surveillance, remote conference and lecturing systems, interactive 3D TV and intelligent TV studio, navigation of (non-intelligent) mobile robots and disabled people, cooperative mobile robots, and so on. In this paper, we first define the framework of CDV and give a brief retrospective view of the computer vision research to show the background of CDV. Then we present technical research results so far obtained: 1) fixed viewpoint pan-tilt-zoom camera for wide-area active imaging, 2) moving object detection and tracking for reactive image acquisition, 3) multi-viewpoints object imaging by cooperative observation stations, and 4) scenario-based cooperative camera-work planning for dynamic scene visualization. Prototype systems demonstrate the effectiveness and practical utilities of the proposed methods.