Algebraic Approach for Recovering Topology in Distributed Camera Networks

Camera networks are widely used for tasks suchas surveillance, monitoring and tracking. In or-der to accomplish these tasks, knowledge of lo-calization information such as camera locationsand other geometric constraints about the envi-ronment (e.g. walls, rooms, and building layout)are typically considered to be essential. How-ever, this information is not always required formany tasks such as estimating the topology ofcamera network coverage, or coordinate-free ob-ject tracking and navigation. In this paper,we propose a simplicial representation (calledCN -Complex) that can be constructed from dis-crete local observations from cameras, and uti-lize this novel representation to recover the topo-logical information of the network coverage. Weprove that our representation captures the cor-rect topological information from network cov-erage for 2.5D layouts, and demonstrate theirutility in simulations as well as a real-worldexperimental set-up. Our proposed approach E.J. Lobaton and S.S. Sastry are with the ElectricalEngineering and Computer Sciences Department, Univer-sity of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USAP. Ahammad is with the Janelia Farm Research Cam-pus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA20147, USAis particularly useful in the context of ad-hoccamera networks in indoor/outdoor urban envi-ronments with distributed but limited computa-tional power and energy.