Geolocating Static Cameras

A key problem in widely distributed camera networks is geolocating the cameras. This paper considers three scenarios for camera localization: localizing a camera in an unknown environment, adding a new camera in a region with many other cameras, and localizing a camera by finding correlations with satellite imagery. We find that simple summary statistics (the time course of principal component coefficients) are sufficient to geolocate cameras without determining correspondences between cameras or explicitly reasoning about weather in the scene. We present results from a database of images from 538 cameras collected over the course of a year. We find that for cameras that remain stationary and for which we have accurate image timestamps, we can localize most cameras to within 50 miles of the known location. In addition, we demonstrate the use of a distributed camera network in the construction a map of weather conditions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Nathan Jacobs, Scott Satkin, Nathaniel Roman, Robert Speyer, Robert Pless
• Keywords: Accurate Image Timestamps, Camera Localization, Camera Networks, Computer Vision, ICCV 2007, Principal Component Coefficients