Metaheuristics-Assisted Placement of Omnidirectional Image Sensors for Visually Obstructed Environments

Optimal camera placement (OCP) is a crucial task for ensuring adequate surveillance of both indoor and outdoor environments. While several solutions to this problem have been documented in the literature, there are still research gaps related to the maximization of surveillance coverage, particularly in terms of optimal placement of omnidirectional camera (OC) sensors in indoor and partially occluded environments via metaheuristic optimization algorithms (MOAs). In this paper, we present a study centered on several popular MOAs and their application to OCP for OC sensors in indoor environments. For our experiments we considered two experimental layouts consisting of both a deployment area, and visual obstructions, as well as two different omnidirectional camera models. The tested MOAs include popular algorithms such as PSO, GWO, SSO, GSA, SMS, SA, DE, GA, and CMA-ES. Experimental results suggest that the success in MOA-based OCP is strongly tied with the specific search strategy applied by the metaheuristic method, thus making certain approaches preferred over others for this kind of problem.