PTZ Camera Control on Robot Telemedicine Service for Infectious Diseases

Abstract

Attentions for medical assistance services to isolated patients have increased due to recent infectious diseases. In the isolation case, telemedicine service is valuable because of no direct contact between infected patients and medical staff. This work proposes a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera control system that provides convenience for medical staff during telemedicine. Our automatic camera controller tracks the region while maintaining the best viewpoint when medical staff selects a region of interest, e.g., a patient's symptoms or wounds. In order to develop the system, several attributes of object trackers suitable for the proposed control system were explored. Based on the evaluations of object trackers, we found that the scale-variance property of object trackers is significant to our PTZ controller. As a result, the proposed approach using a scale-variant object tracker can control the pan, tilt, and zoom to support a convenient telemedicine service without annoying manual viewpoint control.