An effective dual-mode camera system(a passive wide-angle camera and a pan-tilt-zoom camera) is proposed in order to improve the performance of visual surveillance. The fixed wide-angle camera is used to monitor large open areas, but the moving objects on the images are too small to view in detail. And, the PTZ camera is capable of increasing the monitoring area and enhancing the image quality by tracking and zooming in on a specific moving target. However, its FOV (Field of View) is limited when zooming in on a specific target. Therefore, the cooperation of wide-angle and PTZ cameras is complementary. In this paper, we propose an automatic initial set-up algorithm and coordinate transform method from the wide-angle camera coordinate to the PTZ one, which are necessary to achieve the cooperation. The automatic initial set-up algorithm is able to synchronize the views of two cameras. When a moving object appears on the image plane of a wide-angle camera after the initial set-up positioning, the obtained values of the wide-angle camera should be transformed to the PTZ values based on the coordinate transform method. We also develope the PTZ control method. Various in-door and out-door experiments show that the proposed dual-camera system is feasible for the effective visual surveillance.