Setup and calibration of a distributed camera system for surveillance of laboratory space

This paper describes the setup and realization of a distributed camera system designed to survey a laboratory area where humans and mobile manipulator robots collaborate jointly. The system consists of 40 industrial grade cameras surveying a 10 m by 10 m area from a top-down perspective, connected via Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) to a cluster of 40 computers for distributed image processing. The cameras were fully calibrated, achieving an average reprojection error of 0.13 pixels for the complete system, which exceeds state-of-the art accuracy. Current long-term testing has the system running with at least 99.994% availability for up to two weeks. Successful application tests of the system were conducted, where it was used to track the movements of robots and humans across the surveyed area.