Autonomous robot cameraman - Observation pose optimization for a mobile service robot in indoor living space

This paper presents a model based system for a mobile robot to find an optimal pose for the observation of a person in indoor living environments. We define the observation pose as a combination of the camera position and view direction as well as further parameters like the aperture angle. The optimal placement of a camera is not trivial because of the high dynamic range of the scenes near windows or other bright light sources, which often results in poor image quality due to glare or hard shadows. The proposed method tries to minimize these negative effects by determining an optimal camera pose based on two major models: A spatial free space model and a representation of the lighting. In particular, a task-dependent optimization takes into account the intended purpose of the camera images, e.g. different inputs are needed for video communication with other people or for an image-processing based passive observation of the person´s activities. To prove the validity of our approach, we present first experimental results comparing the chosen observation pose and resulting image with and without respect to lighting in different observation tasks.