Electronic pan-tilt-zoom: A solution for Intelligent Room systems

Choosing the appropriate type of video input is an important issue for any vision-based system and the right decision must take into account the specific requirements of the intended application. We present GlobeAll, a modular four-component prototype for a vision-based Intelligent Room: a video input component that uses an electronic pan-tilt-zoom camera array, a background learning and foreground extraction component, a tracking component and an interpretation component. In the context of Intelligent Room systems, we establish several qualitative criteria to evaluate their video input component. We use these principles to compare our electronic pan-tilt-zoom camera with two other current solutions - mobile pan-tilt-zoom and wide-angle lens cameras - and we show that electronic pan-tilt-zoom systems best satisfy our criteria.