Decision-theoretic coordination and control for active multi-camera surveillance in uncertain, partially observable environments

A central problem of surveillance is to monitor multiple targets moving in a large-scale, obstacle-ridden environment with occlusions. This paper presents a novel principled Partially Observable Markov Decision Process-based approach to coordinating and controlling a network of active cameras for tracking and observing multiple mobile targets at high resolution in such surveillance environments. Our proposed approach is capable of (a) maintaining a belief over the targets´ states (i.e., locations, directions, and velocities) to track them, even when they may not be observed directly by the cameras at all times, (b) coordinating the cameras´ actions to simultaneously improve the belief over the targets´ states and maximize the expected number of targets observed with a guaranteed resolution, and (c) exploiting the inherent structure of our surveillance problem to improve its scalability (i.e., linear time) in the number of targets to be observed. Quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art multi-camera coordination and control techniques show that our approach can achieve higher surveillance quality in real time. The practical feasibility of our approach is also demonstrated using real AXIS 214 PTZ cameras.