A framework for distributed managing uncertain data in RFID traceability networks

The ability to track and trace individual items, especially through large-scale and distributed networks, is the key to realizing many important business applications such as supply chain management, asset tracking, and counterfeit detection. Networked RFID (radio frequency identification), which uses the Internet to connect otherwise isolated RFID systems and software, is an emerging technology to support traceability applications. Despite its promising benefits, there remains many challenges to be overcome before these benefits can be realized. One significant challenge centers around dealing with uncertainty of raw RFID data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to effectively manage the uncertainty of RFID data in large scale traceability networks. The framework consists of a global object tracking model and a local RFID data cleaning model. In particular, we propose a Markov-based model for tracking objects globally and a particle filter based approach for processing noisy, low-level RFID data locally. Our implementation validates the proposed approach and the experimental results show its effectiveness.Jiangang Ma, Quan Z. Sheng, Damith Ranasinghe, Jen Min Chuah and Yanbo W

Detection-aware multi-object tracking evaluation

Master Universitario en Deep Learning for Audio and Video Signal ProcessingMulti-Object Tracking (MOT) is a hot topic in the computer vision field. It is a complex task that requires a detector, to identify objects, and a tracker, to follow them. It is useful for self-driving, surveillance and robot vision, between others, where research teams and companies are trying to improve their models. In order to determine which model performs better, they are scored using tracking metrics. In this thesis we experiment with MOT metrics aware of detection by using correlation matrices. By analyzing the results, we realize that tracking metrics incur in certain issues that prevent them for correctly reflecting tracking performance. The performance of the detector is relevant when scoring tracking models. The problem observed is that tracking metrics weigh differently elements that evaluate detection performance. Thus, improving one detector’s aspect with a high weight in the MOT metric will significantly improve the tracker’s score, but not necessarily indicating the amount of effort done by the tracker. That is, trackers are not evaluated in a balanced way. In order to solve this issue with the tracker scoring, we present a new multi-object tracking metric, based on the effort done by the tracker given a certain set of detections. This effort is calculated based on the improvement of bounding boxes over the ones given by the detector and the precision to keep the trace of the objects in a sequence. The metric has been tested for two widely employed datasets and shows us its reliability scoring tracking metrics. Also, it do not incur in the problem presented above

leave a trace - A People Tracking System Meets Anomaly Detection

Video surveillance always had a negative connotation, among others because of the loss of privacy and because it may not automatically increase public safety. If it was able to detect atypical (i.e. dangerous) situations in real time, autonomously and anonymously, this could change. A prerequisite for this is a reliable automatic detection of possibly dangerous situations from video data. This is done classically by object extraction and tracking. From the derived trajectories, we then want to determine dangerous situations by detecting atypical trajectories. However, due to ethical considerations it is better to develop such a system on data without people being threatened or even harmed, plus with having them know that there is such a tracking system installed. Another important point is that these situations do not occur very often in real, public CCTV areas and may be captured properly even less. In the artistic project leave a trace the tracked objects, people in an atrium of a institutional building, become actor and thus part of the installation. Visualisation in real-time allows interaction by these actors, which in turn creates many atypical interaction situations on which we can develop our situation detection. The data set has evolved over three years and hence, is huge. In this article we describe the tracking system and several approaches for the detection of atypical trajectories

Online Metric-Weighted Linear Representations for Robust Visual Tracking

In this paper, we propose a visual tracker based on a metric-weighted linear representation of appearance. In order to capture the interdependence of different feature dimensions, we develop two online distance metric learning methods using proximity comparison information and structured output learning. The learned metric is then incorporated into a linear representation of appearance. We show that online distance metric learning significantly improves the robustness of the tracker, especially on those sequences exhibiting drastic appearance changes. In order to bound growth in the number of training samples, we design a time-weighted reservoir sampling method. Moreover, we enable our tracker to automatically perform object identification during the process of object tracking, by introducing a collection of static template samples belonging to several object classes of interest. Object identification results for an entire video sequence are achieved by systematically combining the tracking information and visual recognition at each frame. Experimental results on challenging video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for both inter-frame tracking and object identification.Comment: 51 pages. Appearing in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc

System Description for a Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, Distributed Garbage Collector

We describe an efficient and fault-tolerant algorithm for distributed cyclic garbage collection. The algorithm imposes few requirements on the local machines and allows for flexibility in the choice of local collector and distributed acyclic garbage collector to use with it. We have emphasized reducing the number and size of network messages without sacrificing the promptness of collection throughout the algorithm. Our proposed collector is a variant of back tracing to avoid extensive synchronization between machines. We have added an explicit forward tracing stage to the standard back tracing stage and designed a tuned heuristic to reduce the total amount of work done by the collector. Of particular note is the development of fault-tolerant cooperation between traces and a heuristic that aggressively reduces the set of suspect objects.Comment: 47 pages, LaTe

Evolutionary Robot Vision for People Tracking Based on Local Clustering

This paper discusses the role of evolutionary computation in visual perception for partner robots. The search of evolutionary computation has many analogies with human visual search. First of all, we discuss the analogies between the evolutionary search and human visual search. Next, we propose the concept of evolutionary robot vision, and a human tracking method based on the evolutionary robot vision. Finally, we show experimental results of the human tracking to discuss the effectiveness of our proposed method