Seamless fusion of GPS-VT service from outdoor to indoor cameras

Cameras and surveillance systems are widely installed at streets, communities, schools, buildings and so on. In our previous results, the global positioning system (GPS) was incorporated with the visual tracking technique, called GPS-VT. A person can be located and tracking according his GPS coordinate in the outdoor environment. However, GPS-VT service is unavailable when the person walks in an indoor environment. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a seamless fusion of GPS-VT service for persons from the outdoor to indoor environment. In order to achieve the above purpose, template matching, shadow removal, and collision resolution techniques are used for the tracking among multiple cameras in the indoor environment. Besides, the elapsed time of a person leaving the field-of-views (FOV) of one camera and entering the FOV of another is not a fixed value. An automatic estimation mechanism is designed and a normal distribution function is used to estimate an acceptable interval of the elapsed time. Such a mechanism is performed for any two successive cameras. Besides, a prototype was implemented to demonstrate that the GPS-VT service is extended from outdoor to indoor environment with multiple cameras.