Vision-based toddler tracking at home

This paper presents a vision-based toddler tracking system for detecting risk factors of a toddler's fall within the home environment. The risk factors have environmental and behavioral aspects and the research in this paper focuses on the behavioral aspects. Apart from common image processing tasks such as background subtraction, the vision-based toddler tracking involves human classification, acquisition of motion and position information, and handling of regional merges and splits. The human classification is based on dynamic motion vectors of the human body. The center of mass of each contour is detected and connected with the closest center of mass in the next frame to obtain position, speed, and directional information. This tracking system is further enhanced by dealing with regional merges and splits due to multiple object occlusions. In order to identify the merges and splits, two directional detections of closest region centers are conducted between every two successive frames. Merges and splits of a single object due to errors in the background subtraction are also handled. The tracking algorithms have been developed, implemented and tested

A study on detection of risk factors of a toddler’s fall injuries using visual dynamic motion cues

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The research in this thesis is intended to aid caregivers’ supervision of toddlers to prevent accidental injuries, especially injuries due to falls in the home environment. There have been very few attempts to develop an automatic system to tackle young children’s accidents despite the fact that they are particularly vulnerable to home accidents and a caregiver cannot give continuous supervision. Vision-based analysis methods have been developed to recognise toddlers’ fall risk factors related to changes in their behaviour or environment. First of all, suggestions to prevent fall events of young children at home were collected from well-known organisations for child safety. A large number of fall records of toddlers who had sought treatment at a hospital were analysed to identify a toddler’s fall risk factors. The factors include clutter being a tripping or slipping hazard on the floor and a toddler moving around or climbing furniture or room structures. The major technical problem in detecting the risk factors is to classify foreground objects into human and non-human, and novel approaches have been proposed for the classification. Unlike most existing studies, which focus on human appearance such as skin colour for human detection, the approaches addressed in this thesis use cues related to dynamic motions. The first cue is based on the fact that there is relative motion between human body parts while typical indoor clutter does not have such parts with diverse motions. In addition, other motion cues are employed to differentiate a human from a pet since a pet also moves its parts diversely. They are angle changes of ellipse fitted to each object and history of its actual heights to capture the various posture changes and different body size of pets. The methods work well as long as foreground regions are correctly segmented

Detecting and tracking multiple interacting objects without class-specific models

We propose a framework for detecting and tracking multiple interacting objects from a single, static, uncalibrated camera. The number of objects is variable and unknown, and object-class-specific models are not available. We use background subtraction results as measurements for object detection and tracking. Given these constraints, the main challenge is to associate pixel measurements with (possibly interacting) object targets. We first track clusters of pixels, and note when they merge or split. We then build an inference graph, representing relations between the tracked clusters. Using this graph and a generic object model based on spatial connectedness and coherent motion, we label the tracked clusters as whole objects, fragments of objects or groups of interacting objects. The outputs of our algorithm are entire tracks of objects, which may include corresponding tracks from groups of objects during interactions. Experimental results on multiple video sequences are shown

A study on detection of risk factors of a toddler's fall injuries using visual dynamic motion cues

The research in this thesis is intended to aid caregivers’ supervision of toddlers to prevent accidental injuries, especially injuries due to falls in the home environment. There have been very few attempts to develop an automatic system to tackle young children’s accidents despite the fact that they are particularly vulnerable to home accidents and a caregiver cannot give continuous supervision. Vision-based analysis methods have been developed to recognise toddlers’ fall risk factors related to changes in their behaviour or environment. First of all, suggestions to prevent fall events of young children at home were collected from well-known organisations for child safety. A large number of fall records of toddlers who had sought treatment at a hospital were analysed to identify a toddler’s fall risk factors. The factors include clutter being a tripping or slipping hazard on the floor and a toddler moving around or climbing furniture or room structures. The major technical problem in detecting the risk factors is to classify foreground objects into human and non-human, and novel approaches have been proposed for the classification. Unlike most existing studies, which focus on human appearance such as skin colour for human detection, the approaches addressed in this thesis use cues related to dynamic motions. The first cue is based on the fact that there is relative motion between human body parts while typical indoor clutter does not have such parts with diverse motions. In addition, other motion cues are employed to differentiate a human from a pet since a pet also moves its parts diversely. They are angle changes of ellipse fitted to each object and history of its actual heights to capture the various posture changes and different body size of pets. The methods work well as long as foreground regions are correctly segmented.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Intelligent video object tracking in large public environments

This Dissertation addresses the problem of video object tracking in large public environments, and was developed within the context of a partnership between ISCTE-IUL and THALES1 object. This partnership aimed at developing a new approach to video tracking, based on a simple tracking algorithm aided by object position estimations to deal with the harder cases of video object tracking. This proposed approach has been applied successfully in the TRAPLE2 project developed at THALES where the main focus is the real-time monitoring of public spaces and the tracking of moving objects (i.e., persons). The proposed low-processing tracking solution woks as follows: after the detection step, the various objects in the visual scene are tracked through their centres of mass (centroids) that, typically, exhibit little variations along close apart video frames. After this step, some heuristics are applied to the results to maintain coherent the identification of the video objects and estimate their positions in cases of uncertainties, e.g., occlusions, which is one of the major novelties proposed in this Dissertation. The proposed approach was tested with relevant test video sequences representing real video monitoring scenes and the obtained results showed that this approach is able to track multiple persons in real-time with reasonable computational power.Esta dissertação aborda o problema do seguimento de objectos vídeo em ambientes públicos de grande dimensão e foi desenvolvida no contexto de uma parceria entre o ISCTE-IUL e a THALES. Esta parceria visou o desenvolvimento de uma nova abordagem ao seguimento de objectos de vídeo baseada num processamento de vídeo simples em conjunto com a estimação da posição dos objectos nos casos mais difíceis de efectuar o seguimento. Esta abordagem foi aplicada com sucesso no âmbito do projecto TRAPLE desenvolvido pela THALES onde um dos principais enfoques é o seguimento de múltiplos objectos de vídeo em tempo real em espaços públicos, tendo como objectivo o seguimento de pessoas que se movam ao longo desse espaço. A solução de baixo nível de processamento proposta funciona do seguinte modo: após o passo de detecção de objectos, os diversos objectos detectados na cena são seguidos através dos seus centros de massa que, normalmente, apresentam poucas variações ao longo de imagens consecutivas de vídeo. Após este passo, algumas heurísticas são aplicadas aos resultados mantendo a identificação dos objectos de vídeo coerente e estimando as suas posições em casos de incertezas (e.g., oclusões) que é uma das principais novidades propostas nesta dissertação. A abordagem proposta foi testada com várias sequências de vídeo de teste representando cenas reais de videovigilância e os resultados obtidos mostraram que esta abordagem é capaz de seguir várias pessoas em tempo real com um nível de processamento moderado

Fuzzy region assignment for visual tracking

In this work we propose a new approach based on fuzzy concepts and heuristic reasoning to deal with the visual data association problem in real time, considering the particular conditions of the visual data segmented from images, and the integration of higher-level information in the tracking process such as trajectory smoothness, consistency of information, and protection against predictable interactions such as overlap/occlusion, etc. The objects' features are estimated from the segmented images using a Bayesian formulation, and the regions assigned to update the tracks are computed through a fuzzy system to integrate all the information. The algorithm is scalable, requiring linear computing resources with respect to the complexity of scenarios, and shows competitive performance with respect to other classical methods in which the number of evaluated alternatives grows exponentially with the number of objects.Research supported by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB and CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255.publicad

Feature-Based Probabilistic Data Association for Video-Based Multi-Object Tracking

This work proposes a feature-based probabilistic data association and tracking approach (FBPDATA) for multi-object tracking. FBPDATA is based on re-identification and tracking of individual video image points (feature points) and aims at solving the problems of partial, split (fragmented), bloated or missed detections, which are due to sensory or algorithmic restrictions, limited field of view of the sensors, as well as occlusion situations

Dynamic scene understanding: Pedestrian tracking from aerial devices.

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is the problem that involves following the trajectory of multiple objects in a sequence, generally a video. Pedestrians are among the most interesting subjects to track and recognize for many purposes such as surveillance, and safety. In the recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) have been viewed as a viable option for monitoring public areas, as they provide a low-cost method of data collection while covering large and difficult-to-reach areas. In this thesis, we present an online pedestrian tracking and re-identification from aerial devices framework. This framework is based on learning a compact directional statistic distribution (von-Mises-Fisher distribution) for each person ID using a deep convolutional neural network. The distribution characteristics are trained to be invariant to clothes appearances and to transformations. In real world scenarios, during deployment, new pedestrian and objects can appear in the scene and the model should detect them as Out Of Distribution (OOD). Thus, our frameworks also includes an OOD detection adopted from [16] called Virtual Outlier Synthetic (VOS), that detects OOD based on synthesising virtual outlier in the embedding space in an online manner. To validate, analyze and compare our approach, we use a large real benchmark data that contain detection tracking and identity annotations. These targets are captured at different viewing angles, different places, and different times by a ”DJI Phantom 4” drone. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework by evaluating their detection, tracking and long term identification performance as well as classification performance between In Distribution (ID) and OOD. We show that the the proposed methods in the framework can learn models that achieve their objectives

AN ADAPTIVE MULTIPLE-OBJECT TRACKING ARCHITECTURE FOR LONG-DURATION VIDEOS WITH VARIABLE TARGET DENSITY

Multiple-Object Tracking (MOT) methods are used to detect targets in individual video frames, e.g., vehicles, people, and other objects, and then record each unique target’s path over time. Current state-of-the-art approaches are extremely complex because most rely on extracting and comparing visual features at every frame to track each object. These approaches are geared toward high-difficulty-tracking scenarios, e.g., crowded airports, and require expensive dedicated hardware, e.g., Graphics Processing Units. In hardware-constrained applications, researchers are turning to older, less complex MOT methods, which reveals a serious scalability issue within the state-of-the-art. Crowded environments are a niche application for MOT, i.e., there are far more residential areas than there are airports. Given complex approaches are not required for low-difficulty-tracking scenarios, i.e., video showing mainly isolated targets, there is an opportunity to utilize more efficient MOT methods for these environments. Nevertheless, little recent research has focused on developing more efficient MOT methods. This thesis describes a novel MOT method, ClusterTracker, that is built to handle variable-difficulty-tracking environments an order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art. It achieves this by avoiding visual features and using quadratic-complexity algorithms instead of the cubic-complexity algorithms found in other trackers. ClusterTracker performs spatial clustering on object detections from short frame sequences, treats clusters as tracklets, and then connects successive tracklets with high bounding-box overlap to form tracks. With recorded video, parallel processing can be applied to several steps of ClusterTracker. This thesis evaluates ClusterTracker’s baseline performance on several benchmark datasets, describes its intended operating environments, and identifies its weaknesses. Subsequent modifications patch these weaknesses while also addressing the scalability concerns of more complex MOT methods. The modified architecture uses clustering feedback to separate isolated targets from non-isolated targets, re-processing the latter with a more complex MOT method. Results show ClusterTracker is uniquely suited for such an approach and allows complex MOT methods to be applied to the challenging tracking situations for which they are intended