City Guarding with Limited Field of View

Abstract

Drones and other small unmanned aerial vehicles are starting to get permission to fly within city limits. While video cameras are easily available in most cities, their purpose is to guard the streets at ground level. Guarding the aerial space of a city with video cameras is a problem that so far has been largely ignored.In this paper, we present bounds on the number of cameras needed to guard a city's aerial space (roofs, walls, and ground) using cameras with 180 • range of vision (the region in front of the guard), which is common for most commercial cameras. We assume all buildings are vertical and have a rectangular base. Each camera is placed at a top corner of a building.We considered the following two versions: (i) buildings have an axis-aligned ground base and, (ii) buildings have an arbitrary orientation. We give necessary and sufficient results for (i), necessary results for (ii), and conjecture sufficiency results for (ii). Specifically, for (i) we prove a sufficiency bound of 2k + ⌊ k 4 ⌋ + 4 on the number of vertex guards, while for (ii) we show that 3k + 1 vertex guards are sometimes necessary, where k is total number of buildings in the city.