A Solid-State, Simultaneous Wide Angle - Detailed View Surveillance Camera

joint work with Ryutaro Oi and Kiyoharu Aizawa

Digital image acquisition is becoming ubiquous. Mass-produced, inexpensive CMOS imaging chips, wireless cellular phone networks, and Internet technology enable mounting large quantities of electronic eyes almost anywhere for remote observation. Notwithstanding the social aspects of this development, the demand for automatic visual data collection and processing is increasing as fast as its technology is progressing.

Remote visual surveillance calls for two different operational modes: during scanning, a large area is continuously surveyed for any supicious activity, which if present must then be scrutinized more closely at high resolution. For this dual-mode application, currently a high-resolution video camera equipped with a motorized zoom lens on a motor-driven two-axis mount is necessary. Due to the mechanical elements involved, such systems are expensive and require frequent maintenance. Furthermore, they can only work in one mode at a time, losing the ability to monitor the big picture when zooming into some region of interest. Finally, camera zooming takes some time which may correspond to lost opportunity to get good images of criminals etc.


Test Scene	Setup

This project pursues an alternative approach for monitoring a wide-angle scene while at the same time observing multiple regions of interest in more detail. Based on CMOS imaging technology, a solid-state multi-sensor array is employed whose pixels can be read out at random. Views of different scene regions can be synthesized at different resolution by sampling the sensors' pixels appropriately, When different sampling patterns are multiplexed, the entire visible scene and multiple regions of interest can be observed simultaneously.

Simultaneous Wide-Angle Monitoring and Multi-Object Surveillance (MPEG movie, 3MB)