Optimal placement of visual sensors along with good lighting conditions is indispensable for the successful execution of surveillance applications. Limited field-of-view, depth-of-field, occlusion due to presence of different objects in the scene form the major constraints for visual sensor placement. While over/under exposed objects, shadowing and light rays directly incident on the camera lens are some of the constraints for light source placement. Because of the nature of the constraints and complexity of the problem, the placement problem is considered to be a multi-objective global optimization problem. The paper outlines the camera and light source location optimization problem with multiple objective functions. Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm is used to maximize the camera coverage with optimum illumination of the sensing space. © 2011 IEEE.