Using Fisheye Camera For Cost-Effective Multi-View People Localization

In advanced multi-view video surveillance systems, people localization is usually a crucial part of the complete system and need to be accomplished in a short time to reserve sufficient processing time for subsequent high-level analysis. As the surveillance area increases, it is required to install a large number of cameras for multi-view people localization. To lower the equipment cost and setup time, we incorporate fisheye (or wide-angle) camera to an efficient vanishing point-based line sampling scheme for people localization, by ensuring the fisheye camera is looking downward so that its principal point becomes the vanishing point of vertical lines. Experimental results show that the utilization of fisheye-camera can (i) achieve localization accuracy comparable or superior to that using ordinary cameras, (ii) reduce the camera count by 75% on the average while covering the same or larger size of a monitored area, and (iii) greatly simplify the camera installation process.