REAL TIME BEST VIEW SELECTION IN CYBER-PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

With the rapid spread of the Internet, more and more people are benefitting from services such as online chatting, video conferencing, VoIP applications and distance education. Our goal is to build upon this trend and improve the Quality of Experience of remote communication systems such as video conferencing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach towards real-time selection and acquisition of the best view of user-selected objects in a remote environment equipped with multiple IP network cameras over the Internet. Traditional three-dimensional viewpoint selection algorithms generally rely on the availability of the 3D model of the physical environment and therefore require a complex model computation process. Therefore, they may work well in completely synthetic environments where the 3D model is available, but are not applicable for the real time communication applications in cyber-physical environments where the response time is a key issue. To address this problem, we first define a new image based metric, Viewpoint Saliency (VS), for evaluating the quality of viewpoints for a captured remote environment, and then based on this new metric, we propose a scheme for controlling multiple cameras to obtain the best view upon the userâ s selection. Since the Viewpoint Saliency measure is purely image-based, 3D model reconstruction is not required. And then we map the real time best view selection and acquisition problem to a â Best Quality Least Effortâ task on a graph formed by available views of an object and model it as a finite cameras state transition problem for energy minimization where the quality of the view measured by VS and its associated cost serve as individual energy terms in the overall energy function. We have implemented our method and the experiments show that the proposed approach is indeed feasible and effective for real time applications in cyber-physical envrionments