METHOD, APPARATUS AND COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR THE SELF-CALIBRATION OF A SURVEILLANCE CAMERA

Video surveillance systems are used, by way of example, for monitoring public places, such as railway stations, junctions, airports, or public buildings, such as libraries, museums, but also private environments, such as an alarm system in houses. To this end, the video surveillance systems often have a plurality of surveillance cameras which observe relevant surveillance scenes. The video sequences produced during observation are usually combined and evaluated at a central location. The invention proposes a method for calibrating a surveillance camera (3), where the surveillance camera (3) depicts a real surveillance scene, which can be described using world coordinates (4), on a surveillance picture (7), which can be described using picture coordinates (4), where at least one trajectory (9) for a moving object (2) in the surveillance scene is determined which comprises a set of position data (10) which describes the position of the moving object (2) using picture coordinates (4) as a function of time, and where the trajectory (9) is used for calibrating the surveillance camera (3) by using a movement model for the moving object (2) to convert the time-dependent position data (10) for the moving object into distances in the real surveillance scene.