User interface for video observation over the internet

1996

In the future, the computer will be thought of more as an assistant than as a tool, and users will increasingly expect machines to make decisions on their behalf. As with a human assistant, a machine’s ability to make informed choices will often depend on the extent of its knowledge of activities in the world around it. Equipping personal computers with a large number of sensors for monitoring their environment is, however, expensive and inconvenient, and a preferable solution would involve a small number of input devices with a broad scope of application. Video cameras are ideally suited to many real- world monitoring applications for this reason. In addition, recent reductions in the manufacturing costs of simple cameras will soon make their widespread deployment in the home and office economically viable. The use of video as an input device also allows the creation of new types of user-interface, more suitable in some circumstances than those afforded by the conventional keyboard and mouse. This thesis examines some examples of these ‘Video-Augmented Environments’ and related work, and then describes two applications in detail. The first, a ‘software cameraman’, uses the analysis of one video stream to control the display of another. The second, ‘BrightBoard’, allows a user to control a computer by making marks on a conventional whiteboard, thus ‘augmenting’ the board with many of the facilities common to electronic documents, including the ability to fax, save, print and email the image of the board. The techniques which were found to be useful in the construction of these applications are common to many systems which monitor real-world video, and so they were combined in a toolkit called ‘Vicar’. This provides an architecture for ‘video plumbing’, which allows standard video- processing components to be connected together under the control of a scripting language. It is a single application which can be programmed to create a variety of simple Video-Augmented Environments, such as those described above, without the need for any recompilation, and so should simplify the construction of such applications in the future. Finally, opportunities for further exploration on this theme are discussed.

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 2013

A global network of webcams offers unique viewpoints from tens of thousands of locations. Understanding the geographic context of this imagery is vital in using these cameras for quantitative environmental monitoring or surveillance applications. We derive robust geo-calibration constraints that allow users to geo-register static or pan-tilt-zoom cameras by specifying a few corresponding points, and describe our web interface suitable for novices. We discuss design decisions that support our scalable, publicly-accessible web service that allows webcam textures to be displayed live on 3D geographic models. Finally, we demonstrate several multimedia applications for geocalibrated cameras.

International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR2011), 2011

In this project, we have proposed, developed and tested a system for remote building site monitoring based on 360˚ panoramas. The system, that consists of a computer, a remote network Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera installed on site, a pair of goggles and an orientation sensor, starts by capturing images of the site in all orientations, then assembles them into a static 360˚ panorama. The panorama can then be remotely viewed in an immersive way by a user wearing goggles equipped with an orientation sensor. In addition, the panorama is augmented with a live video stream that is overlapped and registered at its corresponding location in real time within the panorama as the camera moves. Finally, the panorama is further augmented with a 3D model of the building being built. Results show that the use of a panorama as a background for visualizing the video stream offers a spatial context to the video data, enabling the user to better understand the scene and more freely view the environment....

This work presents a visual telepresence system that captures and projects panoramic images into immersive environments in real-time. A number of images are captured with a ring of cameras (a special mounting of multiple digital cameras that captures synchronized images of a 360 degrees scene). These images are processed by a PC cluster before their transmission. A panoramic image is locally rendered by the proposed optimized stitching method that computes a positioning map for all pixels. Then, a complete cylindrical image is sent over the Internet to a multi-projection virtual environment called CAVERNA Digital®. Since the panoramic view is projected in natural size onto the screens of the virtual environment, the user has the sensation of being present at the remote scene.

Computer, 2019

Millions of network cameras have been deployed worldwide. Real-time data from many network cameras can offer instant views of multiple locations with applications in public safety, transportation management, urban planning, agriculture, forestry, social sciences, atmospheric information, and more. This paper describes the real-time data available from worldwide network cameras and potential applications. Second, this paper outlines the CAM 2 System available to users at https: //www.cam2project.net/. This information includes strategies to discover network cameras and create the camera database, user interface, and computing platforms. Third, this paper describes many opportunities provided by data from network cameras and challenges to be addressed.

2002

This paper describes a system for high resolution video conferencing. A number of camcorders are used to capture the video, which are then mosaiced to generate a wide angle panoramic view. Furthermore this system is made "real-time" by detecting changes and updating them on the mosaic. This system can be deployed on a single machine or on a cluster for better performance. It is also scalable and shows a good real-time performance. The main application for this system is videoconferencing for distance learning but it can be used for any high resolution broadcasting.

Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services - MobiSys '05, 2005

Realityflythrough is a telepresence/tele-reality system that works in the dynamic, uncalibrated environments typically associated with ubiquitous computing. By harnessing networked mobile video cameras, it allows a user to remotely and immersively explore a physical space. RealityFlythrough creates the illusion of complete live camera coverage in a physical environment. This paper describes the architecture of Reali-tyFlythrough, and evaluates it along three dimensions: (1) its support of the abstractions for infinite camera coverage, (2) its scalability, and (3) its robustness to changing user requirements.

1994

problematic and forces the human VE participant to attend to the interface and its "control knobs" in addition to-or instead of-the goals and constraints of the task at hand. If the intention of the human VE participant is, e.g., to observe some object X, then allowing him or her to simply tell the system, "Show me object X" is a more direct and productive interface. This is an instance of task level interaction. In earlier work we characterized the levels of abstraction at which one can interact with virtual objects and processes, and we described the varying "access panels" one obtains (5). Here we will describe a system for specifying behaviors for virtual cameras in terms of task level goals and constraints. As in our earlier work on camera control (6, 7), we make task level control available as well as enabling various direct manipulation metaphors. This paper describes a framework for exploring intelligent camera controls in a 3D virtual environment. It presents a methodology for designing the underlying camera controls based on an analysis of what tasks are to be required in a specific environment. Once an underlying camera framework is built, a variety of interfaces can be connected to the framework. A virtual museum is used as a prototypical virtual environment for this work. This paper identifies some of the tasks that need to be performed in a virtual museum; presents a paradigm for encapsulating those tasks into camera modules; and describes in detail the underlying mechanisms that make up the camera module for navigating through the environment. We share the view of many in the user interface community that one of the first steps in interface design should be a task analysis of the application (e.g., (8, 9)). While this may be a difficult exercise in and of itself, it allows us to identify with reasonable confidence the objects and operations we should provide at the interface, and to specify the necessary software abstractions. While it is impossible to completely describe human behavior at the visual interface for all applications, our analysis, and suggests that the generic visual operations we need to support involve:

2006

In this paper we present a distributed videosurveillance framework. Our end is the remote monitoring of the behavior of people moving in a scene exploiting a virtual reconstruction on low capabilities devices, like PDAs and cell phones. The main novelty of this system is the effective integration of the computer vision and computer graphics modules. The first, using a probabilistic frameworks, can detect the position, the trajectory and the posture of peoples moving in the scene. The second exploits the new possibility of both standard 3D graphics libraries on mobile (namely JSR184 and M3G graphic format) and new PDAs processing capability in order to reconstruct the remote surveillance data in real-time.

Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2002

This paper presents a camera system called FlySPEC. In contrast to a traditional camera system that provides the same video stream to every user, FlySPEC can simultaneously serve different video-viewing requests. This flexibility allows users to conveniently participate in a seminar or meeting at their own pace. Meanwhile, the FlySPEC system provides a seamless blend of manual control and automation. With this control mix, users can easily make tradeoffs between video capture effort and video quality. The FlySPEC camera is constructed by installing a set of Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras near a high-resolution panoramic camera. While the panoramic camera provides the basic functionality of serving different viewing requests, the PTZ camera is managed by our algorithm to improve the overall video quality that may affect users watching details. The video resolution improvements from using different camera management strategies are compared in the experimental section.