A Multiresolution Approach for Large Real-World Camera Placement Optimization Problems

There have been numerous attempts at solving the optimal camera placement problem across multiple applications. Exact linear programming-based, as well as, heuristic combinatorial optimization methods were shown to be successful in providing optimal or near-optimal solutions to this problem. Working over a discrete space model is the general practice when solving the camera placement problem. However, discretized environments often limit the methods’ usage only to small-scale datasets due to resource and time constraints that grow exponentially with the number of 3D points collected from the discrete space. We propose a multi-resolution approach that enables the usage of existing optimization algorithms on large real-world problems modelled using high resolution 3D grids. Our method works by grouping together the given discrete set of possible camera locations into clusters of points, multiple times, resulting in multiple resolution levels. Camera placement optimization is repeated for all resolution levels while propagating the optimized solution from low to high resolutions. Our experiments on both simulated and real data with grids of varying sizes show that using our multi-resolution approach, existing camera placement optimization methods can be used even on high resolution grids consisting of hundreds of thousands of points. Our results also show that the strategy of grouping points together by exploiting underlying 3D geometry to optimize camera poses is not only significantly faster than optimizing on the entire set of samples but, it also provides better camera coverage.