Distributed Camera Systems and Image Sensor Clouds

想象一下，在一个足球场里，每个人都在用他们的手机捕捉比赛的视频。不同的观众跟着不同的球员，一些人跟着球，另一些人可能会打开或关闭他们的相机，许多人在看台上走来走去。如果我们能够实时访问这些视频，我们该如何获取有关游戏的信息？一方面，我们将从多个角度了解球场的所有部分，没有任何事件会被记录下来。另一方面，我们不知道摄像头在任何时候都在哪里，指向哪个方向，甚至不知道有多少摄像头。此外，还会出现巨大的冗余（游戏邦注：即场景中的一个点会被许多摄像机捕捉到）、摄像机之间视场的不同重叠程度、相同物体在不同图像中以不同尺寸出现的情况，以及一系列类似的挑战。

Imagine a soccer stadium in which every person in the capacity crowd is using their cell-phone to capture a video of the game. Different spectators follow different players, some follow the ball instead, others may turn their cameras on or off, and many move about the stands. If we were to have access to these videos in real time, how could we retrieve information about the game? On one hand, we would have information about all parts of the pitch from multiple perspectives and no event would go unrecorded. On the other hand, we do not know where the cameras are at any time, in which directions they point, or even how many there are. There would also be huge redundancy (meaning that a point in the scene is captured by many cameras), variable degrees of overlap in fields-of-view between cameras, instances where identical objects appear at different sizes in different images, and a host of similar challenges. The long-term objective of this proposal is concerned with the construction and use of sensor clouds, of which the soccer stadium illustration is an example. We will consider both the technology of these modules, particularly the image sensor itself, and techniques for network operation and optimization. One possible solution to controlling and using large, random camera networks is to employ 'metacameras,' virtual collections of data that act like a real camera but which can be created and destroyed as necessary, according to simple image-based rules. Shorter-term objectives of this work mirror those above (viz., sensor technology and system operation) but with application to distributed camera systems that are under research and development today. A particular application is to an optical aircraft collision avoidance system using multiple cameras with distributed control based on models of biological collectives, such as ant foraging.