Virtual Forces for Camera Planning in Smart Vision Systems

In this paper, we present a novel and robust approach for camera planning in smart vision systems. The proposed approach uses virtual forces to adjust the camera parameters (pan, tilt, translation ... etc.) toward the most proper values with respect to the application. It employs the physical spring model to direct the motion of the camera toward its target. Our approach is a general framework and any vision system can be easily modeled to use it. This approach has several advantages over previous work in camera planning. It is portable, expandable, robust, and flexible. We present a case study of a two degree-of-freedom stereo vision system to test our approach. The results show the efficiency of our approach even with poor system initialization and its robustness against possible weakness in the auxiliary algorithms used.