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Abstract
The recent explosion of sensing capability has influenced many domains such as medical care, public safety, and national defense. Along with the new capabilities have come new opportunities for providing tele-medicine at a distance, providing surveillance of a large physical area, and to perform reconnaissance in hostile environments. In many, if not all, of these systems performance has not kept up with the perceived opportunities these capabilities embody. Instead, generic challenges have emerged that appear fundamental to human-sensor systems. One such challenge, the multiple feeds problem, refers to the difficulty or inability of human-sensor system users and decision makers to integrate the diversity of sensor feeds that have been instantiated through these sensor systems. This challenge emerges from the lack of adequate system design for the coordination of the multiple perspectives these sensor systems represent. The Perspective Control approach addresses the multiple feeds problem through Perspective Control; a method of controlling point-of-view. In the Perspective Control approach, sensors are considered generic points-of-observation that conform to a spherical coordinate system. A user is able to control a sensor by expressing a desired view direction through a novel input device called a Perspective Controller, which also embodies a spherical coordinate system. This device not only provides a method for controlling a single sensor, but also a method for navigating between sensors. In navigating between sensors the layout of the sensor network is perceived directly (i.e., a form of extending perception). The ability of Perspective Control to solve the multiple feeds problem is established through an operational engineering demonstration that utilizes user controlled viewpoint to control a network of video cameras. This demonstration is embedded in a video surveillance context utilizing a network of pan and tilt capable video cameras. At the heart of the Perspective Control engineering demonstration is the Perspective Control apparatus which is a working prototype designed and built based on constraints of a generic point-of-observation. In addition to the Perspective Controller the engineering demonstration leverages an indoor, video camera surveillance network and a 3-dimensional virtual environment. Perspective Control is one potential approach for solving the multiple feeds problem.
