GlobeAll: panoramic video for an intelligent room

Choosing the appropriate type of video input is an important issue for any vision-based system and the right decision must take into account the specific requirements of the intended application. In the context of intelligent room systems, we establish several qualitative criteria to evaluate the video input component and we use them to compare three current solutions: mobile pan-tilt-zoom cameras, wide-angle lens cameras and electronic pan-tilt-zoom cameras. We show that electronic pan-tilt-zoom systems best satisfy our criteria. To support this claim, we present GlobeAll, a modular four-component prototype for a vision-based intelligent room: a video input component that uses an electronic pan-tilt-zoom camera array, a background learning and foreground extraction component, a tracking component and an interpretation component