PAGELLO, Enrico (Contrà Valmerlara23, Vincenza, I-36100, IT)
PRETTO, Alberto (Via Pacinotti, 19/a, Padova, I-35136, IT)
PAGELLO, Enrico (Contrà Valmerlara23, Vincenza, I-36100, IT)
PRETTO, Alberto (Via Pacinotti, 19/a, Padova, I-35136, IT)
| Claims
1. Vision system device integrating a moving camera (with motors for pan and/or tilt, and/or zoom) and a panoramic camera of any kind (catadioptric or polidiotric). The two cameras thanks to
an intelligent image processing (realized on hardware and/or on software) actively cooperate to monitor the complete surrounding environment by exploiting the advantages of both types of cameras.
2. Devices as claim I 1 in which the panoramic camera is composed by a set of cameras with overlapping or non overlapping fields of view to have a panoramic view of the environment or by a catadioptric camera or by any kind of camera with 360 degrees field of vie of the surrounding environment.
3. Devices as claim 1 and 2, in which the moving camera is any kind of moving camera that can pan, and/or tilt and/or zoom and that can be remotely controlled.
4. Devices as claim 1, 2, 3 in which the sensors are sensitive to any electromagnetical wavelength either visible or non visible
5. Devices as claim 1, 2, 3, 4 that can automatically frame and/or track and/or zoom with a moving camera target of interest detected in the surroundings of the sensor with a panoramic camera.
6. Devices as claim 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 which has internal processing units able to process and/or compress and/or transmit images and that can control motors or which demands these duties to external processing units.
7. Devices as claim 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 which can send and receive data, images, and commands in analogical or digital standards to a remote control unit either via wired or wireless links.
8. Devices implementing one or more of the above claims and/or implementing what has been above substantially described and depicted. |
Description of industrial innovation having title:
Panoramic tracking camera
Field of the invention
This invention refers to a vision system used for filming and for surveillance of environments, human activities and production processes.
State of the art
The state of the art sees the presence on the market of perspective cameras either static or moving cameras (e.g., speed-dome Pan- Tilt-Zoom, PTZ), panoramic cameras
(e.g., omnidirectional cameras), thermo cameras and cameras sensitive to wavelengths different from the visible light (e.g., infrared cameras). These cameras are used to film environments or human activities . The filmed images can be broadcasted to human operators, can be recorded in analogical or digital format, can be processed to extract information (like moving objects or people or the occurring of a certain event). Moving cameras can be controlled in order to follow (or to frame) just a certain region of interest in the scene.
Limitations of the state of the art
Any kind of perspective camera provide a limited field of view (i.e. only a fraction of the surroundings of the camera can be framed). The field of view can be widened by using fish-eye lens, but this results in a loss of resolution and of smaller details in the scene. Moving perspective cameras can be moved around the vertical and horizontal axis in order to frame every part of the scene with a high resolution. On the other hand, at each instant in time they can cover only a portion of the environment. Thus, at any moment there are regions of the scene not framed by the camera. This
might results in a loss of surveillance or in a loss of detection of important actions occurring in non-framed regions (e.g., the fast motion of a person, or the presence of several simultaneous actions at different spots, etc.).
The continuous motion of the camera, that is needed to patrol, the scene severely wear the mechanical and the electronics components of the moving camera. This results in shorter life of the moving camera.
Panoramic cameras (e.g., a catadioptric camera or a polidiotric camera) enable a complete vision of the surroundings of the camera at any time. On the other hand, because of the wide field of view the image resolution is rather low.
Specific Description
Abstract
Vision system device integrating a moving camera (with motors for pan and/or tilt, and/or zoom) and a panoramic camera of any kind (catadioptric or polidiotric). The two cameras thanks to an intelligent image processing (realized on hardware and/or on software) actively cooperate to monitor the complete surrounding environment by exploiting the advantages of both types of cameras. The information extracted from the panoramic images is used with the aim of actively control the moving camera to frame the region, the people, and the objects of interest. The panoramic and the perspective images grabbed by this integrated device can be broadcasted and/or processed to extract information on occurrence of specific actions or on moving objects/people. By fusing the information coming from the images of the two integrated cameras, it is possible to calculate detailed information about the state, the variations and the distance of static and moving objects in the surroundings of the integrated device.
Description
Vision system device integrating a panoramic camera of any kind (e.g., a polidioptric cameras like the one depicted in Fig. B-I, or a catadioptric camera like the one depicted in Fig. A-l-2-5) and a moving camera of any kind (camera that can rotate about its vertical axis and/or the horizontal axis, and/or both axes, like a speed-dome, Fig. A-4). The two cameras actively cooperate to monitor the complete surrounding environment by exploiting the advantages of both types of cameras. This vision system device can process the panoramic images (on software and/or on hardware) by exploiting computer vision and/or artificial intelligence and/or sensor fusion algorithms. The processing is aimed at controlling the
moving camera in order to maximize its performances and its coverage. As an option, also the images coming from the moving camera can be processed to extract additional information at a higher resolution about the state of the monitored environment and of the people/objects in the environment.
The panoramic camera provides a 360 degree horizontal field of view at any time of the environment surrounding the integrate vision system device. The moving camera, for instance a Pan-Tilt- Zoom (PTZ) camera provide at any moment a detailed view of a smaller field of view and the possibility, by activating the moving camera motors, to frame with a higher resolution every area covered by the panoramic camera. The resolution at which every area is framed can be increased by activating the optional zoom installed on the perspective camera, (e.g. Fig. A-3). This integrated device can process the panoramic images and control the moving camera either exploiting an internal processing unit (remotely configurable) and/or the processing can be demanded to a remote processing unit to which the images are transmitted either in analogical or in digital standard. The link (to send the images or to configure the device) between this integrated vision system device and the remote processing unit can either be wired or wireless.
In the normal functioning, only the images grabbed by the panoramic camera are grabbed and processed. The moving camera is activated only when events of interest are detected in the panoramic images. A non-exhaustive list of examples of events of interest are (every actual device can implement just a few of them or all of them or more not listed here):
• Motion of people and/or objects
• Detection of specified people or objects
• Detection of specified actions in the scene
• Detection of specified behaviors of the persons in the scene
The list of events of interest can be selected or parameterized by the human operator. When no events are detected the moving camera is inactive (or optionally it can move on a predefined sequence of motions or be joysticked by a human operator). When one or more events of interest are detected in the panoramic images the moving camera is autonomously moved by the integrating the information of the two cameras to track the cause that triggered the event detection (for instance a moving person or a certain object, called in the following target of interest). The panoramic camera provides a global view of the environment in which the system can track the target of interests even if they are out of the field of view of the moving camera. Other cameras in the environment (e.g., static, panoramic, moving o panoramic and
moving cameras) can exploit the information on the global state of the environment extracted from the panoramic images. In the case, the target of interest is lost in the moving camera, the information provided by the panoramic camera allows to frame again the lost target of interest. The moving camera integrated in this vision system keeps the original functionalities of commercial moving cameras (e.g., PTZ cameras). For instance, it can moves continuously following a predetermined patrolling motion or can be manually joysticked by a remote human operator. In the following we list some of the possible optional functionalities of this integrated vision system device:
• if several target of interest are detected in the scene, the moving camera will frame them on a time-slicing way assigning to every target a time-slice which duration is selected by the user
• the user can assign to different scene portions different priorities in order to have larger time-slice for higher priority regions in case of multiple event detections
• the user can define priorities based on the size, the shape, and/or the color of the target to be tracked and on the kind of action to be tracked.
• the vision system can process also the images grabbed by the moving camera to extract more detailed information on the target of interest
• by fusing the information extracted by the two cameras of the integrated device the rage of the targets of interest can be calculated
Fig. A and B of Table I depict two possible implementations of the proposed device. In the first implementation (Fig. A), the panoramic camera is a catadioptric camera composed of a convex mirror (Fig.A-1), a perspective camera aimed at the tip of the mirror (Fig. A-2), a transparent support (Fig. A-5). The perspective camera is a speed-dome PTZ (Pan-Tilt- Zoom, Fig. A-4) that can rotate about the horizontal and vertical axis and it is fitted with a motorized zoom (Fig. A-3). The second implementation presents an alternative panoramic camera composed of a polidiotric camera (Fig. B-I) (i.e. an array of perspective cameras in pre-set positions (Fig. B-2) whose images can be stitched to create a panoramic image of the surrounding environment. Also for this second implementation the moving camera is a speed-dome PTZ (Fig.B-4).
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