Principal view determination for camera selection in distributed smart camera networks

Within a camera network, the contribution of a camera to the observation of a scene depends on its viewpoint and on the scene configuration. This is a dynamic property, as the scene content is subject to change over time and the camera configuration might not be fixed, e.g. in a mobile network. In this work, we address the problem of effectively determining the principle viewpoint within a network, i.e. the view that contributes most to the desired observation of a scene. This selection is based on the information from each camera's observations of persons in a scene, and only low data rate information is required to be sent over wireless channels since the image frames are first locally processed by each sensor node before transmission. The principal view, complemented with one or more helper views, constitutes a significantly more efficient scene representation than the totality of the available views. This is of great value for the reduction of the amount of image data that needs to be stored or transmitted over the network