An optimal camera placement problem is investigated. The objective is to maximize the area of the field of view (FoV) of a stitched video obtained by stitching video streams from an array of cameras. The positions and poses of these cameras are restricted to a given set of selections. The camera array is designed to be placed inside the abdomen to support minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery. Hence, a few non-traditional requirements/constraints are imposed: Adjacent views are required to overlap to support image registration for seamless video stitching. The resulting effective FoV should be a contiguous region without any holes and should be a convex polygon. With these requirements, traditional camera placement algorithms cannot be directly applied to solve this problem. In this work, we show the complexity of this problem grows exponentially as a function of the problem size, and then present a greedy polynomial time heuristic solution that approximates well to the globally optimal solution. We present a new approach to directly evaluate the combined coverage area (area of FoV) as the union of a set of quadrilaterals. We also propose a graph-based approach to ensure the stitching requirement (overlap between adjacent views) is satisfied. We present a method to find a convex polygon with maximum area from a given polygon. Several design examples show that the proposed algorithm can achieve larger FoV area while using much less computing time.

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