A bank of unscented Kalman filters for multimodal human perception with mobile service robots

A new generation of mobile service robots could be ready soon to operate in human environments if they can robustly estimate position and identity of surrounding people. Researchers in this field face a number of challenging problems, among which sensor uncertainties and real-time constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient solution for simultaneous tracking and recognition of people within the observation range of a mobile robot. Multisensor techniques for legs and face detection are fused in a robust probabilistic framework to height, clothes and face recognition algorithms. The system is based on an efficient bank of Unscented Kalman Filters that keeps a multi-hypothesis estimate of the person being tracked, including the case where the latter is unknown to the robot. Several experiments with real mobile robots are presented to validate the proposed approach. They show that our solutions can improve the robot's perception and recognition of humans, providing a useful contribution for the future application of service robotics

Robust automatic target tracking based on a Bayesian ego-motion compensation framework for airborne FLIR imagery

Automatic target tracking in airborne FLIR imagery is currently a challenge due to the camera ego-motion. This phenomenon distorts the spatio-temporal correlation of the video sequence, which dramatically reduces the tracking performance. Several works address this problem using ego-motion compensation strategies. They use a deterministic approach to compensate the camera motion assuming a specific model of geometric transformation. However, in real sequences a specific geometric transformation can not accurately describe the camera ego-motion for the whole sequence, and as consequence of this, the performance of the tracking stage can significantly decrease, even completely fail. The optimum transformation for each pair of consecutive frames depends on the relative depth of the elements that compose the scene, and their degree of texturization. In this work, a novel Particle Filter framework is proposed to efficiently manage several hypothesis of geometric transformations: Euclidean, affine, and projective. Each type of transformation is used to compute candidate locations of the object in the current frame. Then, each candidate is evaluated by the measurement model of the Particle Filter using the appearance information. This approach is able to adapt to different camera ego-motion conditions, and thus to satisfactorily perform the tracking. The proposed strategy has been tested on the AMCOM FLIR dataset, showing a high efficiency in the tracking of different types of targets in real working conditions

Self-Selective Correlation Ship Tracking Method for Smart Ocean System

In recent years, with the development of the marine industry, navigation environment becomes more complicated. Some artificial intelligence technologies, such as computer vision, can recognize, track and count the sailing ships to ensure the maritime security and facilitates the management for Smart Ocean System. Aiming at the scaling problem and boundary effect problem of traditional correlation filtering methods, we propose a self-selective correlation filtering method based on box regression (BRCF). The proposed method mainly include: 1) A self-selective model with negative samples mining method which effectively reduces the boundary effect in strengthening the classification ability of classifier at the same time; 2) A bounding box regression method combined with a key points matching method for the scale prediction, leading to a fast and efficient calculation. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively deal with the problem of ship size changes and background interference. The success rates and precisions were higher than Discriminative Scale Space Tracking (DSST) by over 8 percentage points on the marine traffic dataset of our laboratory. In terms of processing speed, the proposed method is higher than DSST by nearly 22 Frames Per Second (FPS)

Understanding and Diagnosing Visual Tracking Systems

Several benchmark datasets for visual tracking research have been proposed in recent years. Despite their usefulness, whether they are sufficient for understanding and diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of different trackers remains questionable. To address this issue, we propose a framework by breaking a tracker down into five constituent parts, namely, motion model, feature extractor, observation model, model updater, and ensemble post-processor. We then conduct ablative experiments on each component to study how it affects the overall result. Surprisingly, our findings are discrepant with some common beliefs in the visual tracking research community. We find that the feature extractor plays the most important role in a tracker. On the other hand, although the observation model is the focus of many studies, we find that it often brings no significant improvement. Moreover, the motion model and model updater contain many details that could affect the result. Also, the ensemble post-processor can improve the result substantially when the constituent trackers have high diversity. Based on our findings, we put together some very elementary building blocks to give a basic tracker which is competitive in performance to the state-of-the-art trackers. We believe our framework can provide a solid baseline when conducting controlled experiments for visual tracking research

Bibliographic Review on Distributed Kalman Filtering

In recent years, a compelling need has arisen to understand the effects of distributed information structures on estimation and filtering. In this paper, a bibliographical review on distributed Kalman filtering (DKF) is provided.\ud The paper contains a classification of different approaches and methods involved to DKF. The applications of DKF are also discussed and explained separately. A comparison of different approaches is briefly carried out. Focuses on the contemporary research are also addressed with emphasis on the practical applications of the techniques. An exhaustive list of publications, linked directly or indirectly to DKF in the open literature, is compiled to provide an overall picture of different developing aspects of this area