27 research outputs found
Multitarget Tracking in Nonoverlapping Cameras Using a Reference Set
Tracking multiple targets in nonoverlapping cameras are challenging since the observations of the same targets are often separated by time and space. There might be significant appearance change of a target across camera views caused by variations in illumination conditions, poses, and camera imaging characteristics. Consequently, the same target may appear very different in two cameras. Therefore, associating tracks in different camera views directly based on their appearance similarity is difficult and prone to error. In most previous methods, the appearance similarity is computed either using color histograms or based on pretrained brightness transfer function that maps color between cameras. In this paper, a novel reference set based appearance model is proposed to improve multitarget tracking in a network of nonoverlapping cameras. Contrary to previous work, a reference set is constructed for a pair of cameras, containing subjects appearing in both camera views. For track association, instead of directly comparing the appearance of two targets in different camera views, they are compared indirectly via the reference set. Besides global color histograms, texture and shape features are extracted at different locations of a target, and AdaBoost is used to learn the discriminative power of each feature. The effectiveness of the proposed method over the state of the art on two challenging real-world multicamera video data sets is demonstrated by thorough experiments
Motion prediction and interaction localisation of people in crowds
PhDThe ability to analyse and predict the movement of people in crowded scenarios can be of
fundamental importance for tracking across multiple cameras and interaction localisation. In this
thesis, we propose a person re-identification method that takes into account the spatial location
of cameras using a plan of the locale and the potential paths people can follow in the unobserved
areas. These potential paths are generated using two models. In the first, people’s trajectories are
constrained to pass through a set of areas of interest (landmarks) in the site. In the second we
integrate a goal-driven approach to the Social Force Model (SFM), initially introduced for crowd
simulation. SFM models the desire of people to reach specific interest points (goals) in a site,
such as exits, shops, seats and meeting points while avoiding walls and barriers. Trajectory propagation
creates the possible re-identification candidates, on which association of people across
cameras is performed using spatial location of the candidates and appearance features extracted
around a person’s head. We validate the proposed method in a challenging scenario from London
Gatwick airport and compare it to state-of-the-art person re-identification methods.
Moreover, we perform detection and tracking of interacting people in a framework based
on SFM that analyses people’s trajectories. The method embeds plausible human behaviours
to predict interactions in a crowd by iteratively minimising the error between predictions and
measurements. We model people approaching a group and restrict the group formation based
on the relative velocity of candidate group members. The detected groups are then tracked by
linking their centres of interaction over time using a buffered graph-based tracker. We show how
the proposed framework outperforms existing group localisation techniques on three publicly
available datasets
Energy Minimization for Multiple Object Tracking
Multiple target tracking aims at reconstructing trajectories of several
moving targets in a dynamic scene, and is of significant relevance for a
large number of applications. For example, predicting a pedestrian’s
action may be employed to warn an inattentive driver and reduce road
accidents; understanding a dynamic environment will facilitate
autonomous robot navigation; and analyzing crowded scenes can prevent
fatalities in mass panics.
The task of multiple target tracking is challenging for various reasons:
First of all, visual data is often ambiguous. For example, the objects
to be tracked can remain undetected due to low contrast and occlusion.
At the same time, background clutter can cause spurious measurements
that distract the tracking algorithm. A second challenge arises when
multiple measurements appear close to one another. Resolving
correspondence ambiguities leads to a combinatorial problem that quickly
becomes more complex with every time step. Moreover, a realistic model
of multi-target tracking should take physical constraints into account.
This is not only important at the level of individual targets but also
regarding interactions between them, which adds to the complexity of the
problem.
In this work the challenges described above are addressed by means of
energy minimization. Given a set of object detections, an energy
function describing the problem at hand is minimized with the goal of
finding a plausible solution for a batch of consecutive frames. Such
offline tracking-by-detection approaches have substantially advanced the
performance of multi-target tracking. Building on these ideas, this
dissertation introduces three novel techniques for multi-target tracking
that extend the state of the art as follows: The first approach
formulates the energy in discrete space, building on the work of Berclaz
et al. (2009). All possible target locations are reduced to a regular
lattice and tracking is posed as an integer linear program (ILP),
enabling (near) global optimality. Unlike prior work, however, the
proposed formulation includes a dynamic model and additional constraints
that enable performing non-maxima suppression (NMS) at the level of
trajectories. These contributions improve the performance both
qualitatively and quantitatively with respect to annotated ground truth.
The second technical contribution is a continuous energy function for
multiple target tracking that overcomes the limitations imposed by
spatial discretization. The continuous formulation is able to capture
important aspects of the problem, such as target localization or motion
estimation, more accurately. More precisely, the data term as well as
all phenomena including mutual exclusion and occlusion, appearance,
dynamics and target persistence are modeled by continuous differentiable
functions. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is minimized
locally by standard conjugate gradient descent in combination with
custom discontinuous jumps. The more accurate representation of the
problem leads to a powerful and robust multi-target tracking approach,
which shows encouraging results on particularly challenging video
sequences.
Both previous methods concentrate on reconstructing trajectories, while
disregarding the target-to-measurement assignment problem. To unify both
data association and trajectory estimation into a single optimization
framework, a discrete-continuous energy is presented in Part III of this
dissertation. Leveraging recent advances in discrete optimization
(Delong et al., 2012), it is possible to formulate multi-target tracking
as a model-fitting approach, where discrete assignments and continuous
trajectory representations are combined into a single objective
function. To enable efficient optimization, the energy is minimized
locally by alternating between the discrete and the continuous set of
variables.
The final contribution of this dissertation is an extensive discussion
on performance evaluation and comparison of tracking algorithms, which
points out important practical issues that ought not be ignored