Tracking people in crowds by a part matching approach

The major difficulty in human tracking is the problem raised by challenging occlusions where the target person is repeatedly and extensively occluded by either the background or another moving object. These types of occlusions may cause significant changes in the person's shape, appearance or motion, thus making the data association problem extremely difficult to solve. Unlike most of the existing methods for human tracking that handle occlusions by data association of the complete human body, in this paper we propose a method that tracks people under challenging spatial occlusions based on body part tracking. The human model we propose consists of five body parts with six degrees of freedom and each part is represented by a rich set of features. The tracking is solved using a layered data association approach, direct comparison between features (feature layer) and subsequently matching between parts of the same bodies (part layer) lead to a final decision for the global match (global layer). Experimental results have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2008 IEEE

Robust Event Detection and Retrieval in Surveillance Video

We developed a robust event detection and retrieval system for surveillance video. The proposed system offers vision-based capabilities for the detection and tracking of various objects of interest, and can recognize events such as: 1. a person with certain attributes being present in the scene; 2. two people meeting; 3. people carrying bags; 4. bags being dropped; 5. bags being stolen; 6. bags being exchanged; 7. two people handshaking; 8. one person's pointing gesture. We use an improved adaptive Gaussian mixture model for background modeling and foreground detection; a connected component labeling algorithm is then employed to label the foreground pixels. A Kalman filter approach is used to build models for the entities of interest (people and bags), which is combined with color histograms for tracking. We use shape symmetry analysis and color histograms to detect people carrying bags. Our experiments demonstrate the ability to search for instances of events according to specific attributes in large video sequences

Visual Human Tracking and Group Activity Analysis: A Video Mining System for Retail Marketing

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Computer Sciences, 2007In this thesis we present a system for automatic human tracking and activity recognition from video sequences. The problem of automated analysis of visual information in order to derive descriptors of high level human activities has intrigued computer vision community for decades and is considered to be largely unsolved. A part of this interest is derived from the vast range of applications in which such a solution may be useful. We attempt to find efficient formulations of these tasks as applied to the extracting customer behavior information in a retail marketing context. Based on these formulations, we present a system that visually tracks customers in a retail store and performs a number of activity analysis tasks based on the output from the tracker. In tracking we introduce new techniques for pedestrian detection, initialization of the body model and a formulation of the temporal tracking as a global trans-dimensional optimization problem. Initial human detection is addressed by a novel method for head detection, which incorporates the knowledge of the camera projection model.The initialization of the human body model is addressed by newly developed shape and appearance descriptors. Temporal tracking of customer trajectories is performed by employing a human body tracking system designed as a Bayesian jump-diffusion filter. This approach demonstrates the ability to overcome model dimensionality ambiguities as people are leaving and entering the scene. Following the tracking, we developed a two-stage group activity formulation based upon the ideas from swarming research. For modeling purposes, all moving actors in the scene are viewed here as simplistic agents in the swarm. This allows to effectively define a set of inter-agent interactions, which combine to derive a distance metric used in further swarm clustering. This way, in the first stage the shoppers that belong to the same group are identified by deterministically clustering bodies to detect short term events and in the second stage events are post-processed to form clusters of group activities with fuzzy memberships. Quantitative analysis of the tracking subsystem shows an improvement over the state of the art methods, if used under similar conditions. Finally, based on the output from the tracker, the activity recognition procedure achieves over 80% correct shopper group detection, as validated by the human generated ground truth results

Advances in Monocular Exemplar-based Human Body Pose Analysis: Modeling, Detection and Tracking

Esta tesis contribuye en el análisis de la postura del cuerpo humano a partir de secuencias de imágenes adquiridas con una sola cámara. Esta temática presenta un amplio rango de potenciales aplicaciones en video-vigilancia, video-juegos o aplicaciones biomédicas. Las técnicas basadas en patrones han tenido éxito, sin embargo, su precisión depende de la similitud del punto de vista de la cámara y de las propiedades de la escena entre las imágenes de entrenamiento y las de prueba. Teniendo en cuenta un conjunto de datos de entrenamiento capturado mediante un número reducido de cámaras fijas, paralelas al suelo, se han identificado y analizado tres escenarios posibles con creciente nivel de dificultad: 1) una cámara estática paralela al suelo, 2) una cámara de vigilancia fija con un ángulo de visión considerablemente diferente, y 3) una secuencia de video capturada con una cámara en movimiento o simplemente una sola imagen estática