Illumination-robust people tracking using a smart camera network

Abstract

Many computer vision based applications require reliable tracking of multiple people under unpredictable lighting conditions. Many existing trackers do not handle illumination changes well, especially sudden changes in illumination. This paper presents a system to track multiple people reliably even under rapid illumination changes using a network of calibrated smart cameras with overlapping views. Each smart camera extracts foreground features by detecting texture changes between the current image and a static background image. The foreground features belonging to each person are tracked locally on each camera but these local estimates are sent to a fusion center which combines them to generate more accurate estimates. The nal estimates are fed back to all smart cameras, which use them as prior information for tracking in the next frame. The texture based approach makes our method very robust to illumination changes. We tested the performance of our system on six video sequences, some containing sudden illumination changes and up to four walking persons. The results show that our tracker can track multiple people accurately with an average tracking error as low as 8 cm even when the illumination varies rapidly. Performance comparison to a state-of-the-art tracking system shows that our method outperforms.