Visual surveillance and monitoring system using an omnidirectional video camera

This paper describes a visual surveillance and monitoring system which is based on omnidirectional imaging and view-dependent image generation from omnidirectional video streams. While conventional visual surveillance and monitoring systems usually consist of either a number of fixed regular cameras or a mechanically controlled camera, the proposed system has a single omnidirectional video camera using a hyperboloidal mirror. This approach has an advantage of less latency in looking around a large field of view. In a prototype system developed, the viewing direction is determined by viewers' head tracking, by using a mouse, or by moving object tracking in the omnidirectional image.