Cameras

Multiple cameras are placed around the room to densely cover almost the whole space. We are working with a simple webcameras from PYRO and unibrain which are cheap and thus can be used in large numbers if required. Their drawback is a lack external triggering so they have to be synchronized by software means [1]. But the system is not limited to a particular type of camera, even omnidirectional camera (for example fish-eye) or an active (pan-tilt-zoom) camera might be used.

We have a self-calibration method (publicly available) written by Tomas Svoboda which establishes a common coordinate system between cameras. Color alignment has to be done due to different photometric properties of each camera.

Demos

• synchronized captrure (avi)
• multi-camera self-calibration by moving object (avi)
• color alignment (avi/DivX)
• camera comparison (html)