In large-scale surveillance of urban or rural areas, an effective placement of cameras is critical in maximizing surveillance coverage or minimizing economic cost of cameras. Existing Surveillance Camera Placement (SCP) methods generally focus on physical coverage of surveillance by implicitly assuming uniform distribution of interested targets or objects across all blocks, which is, however, uncommon in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we are the first to propose a target-aware SCP (tSCP) model, which prioritizes optimizing the task based on uneven target densities, allowing cameras to preferentially cover blocks with more interested targets. First, we define target density as the likelihood of interested targets occurring in a block, which is positively correlated with the importance of the block. Second, we combine aerial imagery with a lightweight object detection network to identify target density. Third, we formulate tSCP as an optimization problem to maximize target coverage in surveillance area, and solve this problem with a target-guided genetic algorithm. Our method optimizes the rational and economical utilization of cameras in large-scale video survillance. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our tSCP achieves the highest target coverage with a fixed number of cameras (8.31%-14.81% more than its peers), or utilizes the minimum number of cameras to achieve a preset target coverage. Codes are available athttps://github.com/wu-hongxin/tSCP_main.

We are indebted to Spink and Tiba Spink and Tiba [3] for pointing out that the key technical lemma (Lemma 4) is incorrect in our paper [2]. We tried to make a revision for fixing the gap. However, with the help of mathematical software Lingo, we found that our lemma has counterexamples and its conclusion is incorrect. The Bollobás--Scott conjecture Spink and Tiba [3], “Every $r$-uniform hypergraph with $m$ edges has a vertex partition into $k$ sets with at most $m/k^r+o(m)$ edges in each set,” remains open for $r\ge4$ and seems difficult. The following result shows that Lemma 4 in [2] is wrong even in the case $k=2$.

Let $r\ge 3$ and $k\ge 2$ be fixed integers. Bollobás and Scott conjectured that every $r$-uniform hypergraph with $m$ edges has a vertex partition into $k$ sets with at most $m/k^r+o(m)$ edges in each set, and proved the conjecture in the case $r=3$. In this paper, we confirm this conjecture in the case $r=4$ by showing that every 4-uniform hypergraph with $m$ edges has a vertex partition into $k$ sets with at most $m/k^4+O(m^{8/9})$ edges in each set.