Egocentric view transition for video monitoring in a distributed camera network

Current visual surveillance system usually includes multiple cameras to monitor the activities of targets over a large area. An important issue for the guard or user using the system is to understand a series of events occurring in the environment, for example to track a target walking across multiple cameras. Opposite to the traditional systems switching the camera view from one to another directly, we propose a novel approach to egocentric view transition, which synthesizes the virtual views during the period of switching cameras, to ease the mental effort for users to understand the events. An important property of our system is that it can be applied to the situations of where the view fields of transition cameras are not close enough or even exclusive. Such situations have never been taken into consideration in the state-of-the-art view transition techniques, to our best knowledge. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.