An Efficient and Effective Localization Method for Networked Disjoint Top-View Cameras

Disjoint top-view networked cameras are among the most commonly utilized networks in many applications. One of the open questions for these cameras´ study is the computation of extrinsic parameters (positions and orientations), named extrinsic calibration or localization of cameras. Current approaches either rely on strict assumptions of the object motion for accurate results or fail to provide results of high accuracy without the requirement of the object motion. To address these shortcomings, we present a location-constrained maximum a posteriori (LMAP) approach by applying known locations in the surveillance area, some of which would be passed by the object opportunistically. The LMAP approach formulates the problem as a joint inference of the extrinsic parameters and object trajectory based on the cameras´ observations and the known locations. In addition, a new task-oriented evaluation metric, named MABR (the Maximum value of All image points´ Back-projected localization errors´ L2 norms Relative to the area of field of view), is presented to assess the quality of the calibration results in an indoor object tracking context. Finally, results herein demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art algorithm based on the presented MABR and classical evaluation metric in simulations and real experiments.