On-demand sharing of a high-resolution panorama video from networked robotic cameras

Due to their flexibility in coverage and resolution, networked robotic cameras become more and more popular in applications such as natural observation, security surveillance, and distance learning. Equipped with a high optical zoom lens, a networked robotic camera can generate a giga-pixel-level panorama to cover its viewable region. As new live frames enter the system, this panorama can be updated as a panorama video. User requests are usually not limited to the current camera frame. A user may request a specific region associated with a specific time window. To satisfy different spatiotemporal requests for multiple concurrent users, we present systems and algorithms to allow the on-demand sharing of the high-resolution panorama video. The high-resolution panorama video is encoded into a patch-based representation to allow efficient storage and on-demand content delivery. We present system architecture, user interface, data representation, and encoding/decoding algorithms. In the experiment, we have implemented the system using the MPEG-2 codec. Experimental results show that our system can not only satisfy different spatiotemporal queries but also significantly reduce computation time and communication bandwidth requirement.