Comparison of fusion methods for thermo-visual surveillance tracking

In this paper, we evaluate the appearance tracking performance of multiple fusion schemes that combine information from standard CCTV and thermal infrared spectrum video for the tracking of surveillance objects, such as people, faces, bicycles and vehicles. We show results on numerous real world multimodal surveillance sequences, tracking challenging objects whose appearance changes rapidly. Based on these results we can determine the most promising fusion scheme

Pedestrian Detection and Tracking in Video Surveillance System: Issues, Comprehensive Review, and Challenges

Pedestrian detection and monitoring in a surveillance system are critical for numerous utility areas which encompass unusual event detection, human gait, congestion or crowded vicinity evaluation, gender classification, fall detection in elderly humans, etc. Researchers’ primary focus is to develop surveillance system that can work in a dynamic environment, but there are major issues and challenges involved in designing such systems. These challenges occur at three different levels of pedestrian detection, viz. video acquisition, human detection, and its tracking. The challenges in acquiring video are, viz. illumination variation, abrupt motion, complex background, shadows, object deformation, etc. Human detection and tracking challenges are varied poses, occlusion, crowd density area tracking, etc. These results in lower recognition rate. A brief summary of surveillance system along with comparisons of pedestrian detection and tracking technique in video surveillance is presented in this chapter. The publicly available pedestrian benchmark databases as well as the future research directions on pedestrian detection have also been discussed

Visual Clutter Study for Pedestrian Using Large Scale Naturalistic Driving Data

Some of the pedestrian crashes are due to driver’s late or difficult perception of pedestrian’s appearance. Recognition of pedestrians during driving is a complex cognitive activity. Visual clutter analysis can be used to study the factors that affect human visual search efficiency and help design advanced driver assistant system for better decision making and user experience. In this thesis, we propose the pedestrian perception evaluation model which can quantitatively analyze the pedestrian perception difficulty using naturalistic driving data. An efficient detection framework was developed to locate pedestrians within large scale naturalistic driving data. Visual clutter analysis was used to study the factors that may affect the driver’s ability to perceive pedestrian appearance. The candidate factors were explored by the designed exploratory study using naturalistic driving data and a bottom-up image-based pedestrian clutter metric was proposed to quantify the pedestrian perception difficulty in naturalistic driving data. Based on the proposed bottom-up clutter metrics and top-down pedestrian appearance based estimator, a Bayesian probabilistic pedestrian perception evaluation model was further constructed to simulate the pedestrian perception process

Agreeing to Cross: How Drivers and Pedestrians Communicate

The contribution of this paper is twofold. The first is a novel dataset for studying behaviors of traffic participants while crossing. Our dataset contains more than 650 samples of pedestrian behaviors in various street configurations and weather conditions. These examples were selected from approx. 240 hours of driving in the city, suburban and urban roads. The second contribution is an analysis of our data from the point of view of joint attention. We identify what types of non-verbal communication cues road users use at the point of crossing, their responses, and under what circumstances the crossing event takes place. It was found that in more than 90% of the cases pedestrians gaze at the approaching cars prior to crossing in non-signalized crosswalks. The crossing action, however, depends on additional factors such as time to collision (TTC), explicit driver's reaction or structure of the crosswalk.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Near-field Perception for Low-Speed Vehicle Automation using Surround-view Fisheye Cameras

Cameras are the primary sensor in automated driving systems. They provide high information density and are optimal for detecting road infrastructure cues laid out for human vision. Surround-view camera systems typically comprise of four fisheye cameras with 190{\deg}+ field of view covering the entire 360{\deg} around the vehicle focused on near-field sensing. They are the principal sensors for low-speed, high accuracy, and close-range sensing applications, such as automated parking, traffic jam assistance, and low-speed emergency braking. In this work, we provide a detailed survey of such vision systems, setting up the survey in the context of an architecture that can be decomposed into four modular components namely Recognition, Reconstruction, Relocalization, and Reorganization. We jointly call this the 4R Architecture. We discuss how each component accomplishes a specific aspect and provide a positional argument that they can be synergized to form a complete perception system for low-speed automation. We support this argument by presenting results from previous works and by presenting architecture proposals for such a system. Qualitative results are presented in the video at https://youtu.be/ae8bCOF77uY.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Scale-adaptive spatial appearance feature density approximation for object tracking

Object tracking is an essential task in visual traffic surveillance. Ideally, a tracker should be able to accurately capture an object's natural motion such as translation, rotation, and scaling. However, it is well known that object appearance varies due to changes in viewing angle, scale, and illumination. They introduce ambiguity to the image cue on which a visual tracker usually relies and which affects the tracking performance. Thus, a robust image appearance cue is required. This paper proposes scale-adaptive spatial appearance feature density approximation to represent objects and construct the image cue. It is found that the appearance representation improves the sensitivity on both the object's rotation and scale. The image cue is then constructed by both the appearance representation of the object and its surrounding background such that distinguishable parts of an object can be tracked under poor imaging conditions. Moreover, tracking dynamics is integrated with the image cue so that objects are efficiently localized in a gradient-based process. Comparative experiments show that the proposed method is effective in capturing the natural motion of objects and generating better tracking accuracy under different image conditions. © 2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versio