A monocular system for person tracking: Implementation and testing

Abstract

This paper presents a complete functional system capable of detecting people and tracking their motion in either live camera feed or pre-recorded video sequences. The system consists of two main modules, namely the detection and tracking modules. Automatic detection aims at locating human faces and is based on fusion of color and feature-based information. Thus, it is capable of handling faces in different orientations and poses (frontal, profile, intermediate). To avoid false detections, a number of decision criteria are employed. Tracking is performed using a variant of the well-known Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi tracker, while occlusion is handled through a re-detection stage. Manual intervention is allowed to assist both modules if required. In manual mode, the system can track any object of interest, so long as there are enough features to track. The system caters for calibrated cameras and can provide 3-D coordinates of any tracked object(s) of interest. It has been tested with very good results on a variety of video sequences, including a database of studio video sequences, for which 3-D ground truth data, originating from a 4-camera infrared tracking system, exist.