A compactmodular active vision system formulti-target surveillance

This paper presents an omnidirectional active vision system that has been developed for the autonomous acquisition of detailed images of multiple targets. Omnidirectional and perspective camera technologies are integrated to create a robust vision system that combines the strengths of both camera types. A compact, inexpensive and highly modular design is presented in which system modules are stacked vertically. The vertical structure provides each module with an unobstructed 360 degree horizontal view of the surroundings and allows the omnidirectional cameras to directly guide an active camera to view a target point. The physical system design is detailed, along with a description of the system´s hardware and software architectures. The hardware architecture is scalable and fully self contained, while the software architecture is built around a user datagram protocol (UDP) network, allowing the computational load to be distributed over multiple computers.