Outdoor see-through vision utilizing surveillance cameras

This paper presents a new outdoor mixed-reality system designed for people who carry a camera-attached small handy device in an outdoor scene where a number of surveillance cameras are embedded. We propose a new functionality in outdoor mixed reality that the handy device can display live status of invisible areas hidden by some structures such as buildings, walls, etc. The function is implemented on a camera-attached, small handy subnotebook PC (HPC). The videos of the invisible areas are taken by surveillance cameras and they are precisely overlapped on the video of HPC camera, hence a user can notice objects in the invisible areas and see directly what the objects do. We utilize surveillance cameras for two purposes. (1) They obtain videos of invisible areas. The videos are trimmed and warped so as to impose them into the video of the HPC camera. (2) They are also used for updating textures of calibration markers in order to handle possible texture changes in real outdoor world. We have implemented a preliminary system with four surveillance cameras and proved that our system can visualize invisible areas in real time.