Worldview and route planning using live public cameras

Planning a trip needs to consider many unpredictable factors along the route such as traffic, weather, accidents, etc. People are interested viewing the places they plan to visit and the routes they plan to take. This paper presents a system with an Android mobile application that allows users to: (i) Watch the live feeds (videos or snapshots) from more than 65,000 geotagged public cameras around the world. The user can select the cameras using an interactive world map. (ii) Search for and watch the live feeds from the cameras along the route between a starting point and a destination. The system consists of a server which maintains a database with the cameras' information, and a mobile application that shows the camera map and communicates with the cameras. In order to evaluate the system, we compare it with existing systems in terms of the total number of cameras, the cameras' coverage, and the number of cameras on various routes. We also discuss the response time of loading the camera map, finding the cameras on a route, and communicating with the cameras.