Visibility Analysis and Sensor Planning in Dynamic Environments

We analyze visibility from static sensors in a dynamic scene with moving obstacles (people). Such analysis is considered in a probabilistic sense in the context of multiple sensors, so that visibility from even one sensor might be sufficient. Additionally, we analyze worst-case scenarios for high-security areas where targets are non-cooperative. Such visibility analysis provides important performance characterization of multi-camera systems. Furthermore, maximization of visibility in a given region of interest yields the optimum number and placement of cameras in the scene. Our analysis has applications in surveillance manual or automated and can be utilized for sensor planning in places like museums, shopping malls, subway stations and parking lots. We present several example scenes simulated and real for which interesting camera configurations were obtained using the formal analysis developed in the paper.