Releaf: An Efficient Method for Real-Time Occlusion Handling by Game Theory

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 24; no. 17; p. 5727
• Main Authors: Osooli, Hamid, Joshi, Nakul, Khurana, Pranav, Nikoofard, Amirhossein, Shirmohammadi, Zahra, Azadeh, Reza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 03.09.2024
• Subjects: Algorithms; Cameras; Computer vision; Decision making; Design; Equilibrium; Game theory; Information storage; mechanism design; Methods; occlusion handling; real-time tracking; robotic eye; Robotics; real-time tracking; robotic eye; mechanism design; game theory; occlusion handling
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s24175727

Receiving uninterrupted videos from a scene with multiple cameras is a challenging task. One of the issues that significantly affects this task is called occlusion. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for occlusion handling in multi-camera systems. The proposed algorithm, which is called Real-time leader finder (Releaf), leverages mechanism design to assign leader and follower roles to each of the cameras in a multi-camera setup. We assign leader and follower roles to the cameras and lead the motion by the camera with the least occluded view using the Stackelberg equilibrium. The proposed approach is evaluated on our previously open-sourced tendon-driven 3D-printed robotic eye that tracks the face of a human subject. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the Q-leaning and Deep Q Networks (DQN) baselines, achieving an improvement of 20% and 18% for horizontal errors and an enhancement of 81% for vertical errors, as measured by the root mean squared error metric. Furthermore, Releaf has the superiority of real-time performance, which removes the need for training and makes it a promising approach for occlusion handling in multi-camera systems.