Fusion techniques for activity recognition using multi-camera networks

Real-time automatic activity recognition is an important area of research in the field of Computer Vision with plenty of applications in surveillance, gaming, entertainment and automobile safety. Because of advances in wireless networks and camera technologies, distributed camera networks are becoming more prominent. Distributed camera networks offer complimentary views of scenes and hence are better suited for real-time surveillance applications. They are robust to camera failures and in-complete field of views.;In a camera network, fusing information from multiple cameras is an important problem, especially when one doesn\u27t have knowledge of subjects orientation with respect to the camera and when arrangement of cameras is not symmetric. The objective of this dissertation is to design a information fusion technique for camera networks and to apply them in the contenxt of surveillance and safety applications (in coal-mines). (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

Robust Real-Time Recognition of Action Sequences Using a Multi-Camera Network

Real-time identification of human activities in urban environments is increasingly becoming important in the context of public safety and national security. Distributed camera networks that provide multiple views of a scene are ideally suited for real-time action recognition. However, deployments of multi-camera based real-time action recognition systems have thus far been inhibited because of several practical issues and restrictive assumptions that are typically made such as the knowledge of a subjects orientation with respect to the cameras, the duration of each action and the conformation of a network deployment during the testing phase to that of a training deployment. In reality, action recognition involves classification of continuously streaming data from multiple views which consists of an interleaved sequence of various human actions. While there has been extensive research on machine learning techniques for action recognition from a single view, the issues arising in the fusion of data from multiple views for reliable action recognition have not received as much attention. In this thesis, I have developed a fusion framework for human action recognition using a multi-camera network that addresses these practical issues of unknown subject orientation, unknown view configurations, action interleaving and variable duration actions.;The proposed framework consists of two components: (1) a score-fusion technique that utilizes underlying view-specific supervised learning classifiers to classify an action within a given set of frames and (2) a sliding window technique that is used to parse a sequence of frames into multiple actions. The use of a score-fusion technique as opposed to a feature-level fusion of data from multiple views allows us to robustly classify actions even when camera configurations are arbitrary and different from training phase and at the same time reduces the required network bandwidth for data transmission permitting wireless deployments. Moreover, the proposed framework is independent of the underlying classifier that is used to generate scores for each action snippet and thus offers more flexibility compared to sequential approaches like Hidden Markov Models. The amount of training and parameterization is also significantly lower compared to HMM-based approaches. This Real-Time recognition system has been tested on 4 classifiers which are Linear Discriminant Analysis, Multinomial Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machines. Over 90% accuracy has been achieved by this system in Real-Time recognizing variable duration actions performed by the subject. The performance of the system is also shown to be robust to camera failures