Multiple Human Tracking Using an Omnidirectional Camera with Local Rectification and World Coordinates Representation

• Published in: IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems Vol. E103.D; no. 6; pp. 1265 - 1275
• Main Authors: NISHIMURA, Hitoshi, MAKIBUCHI, Naoya, TASAKA, Kazuyuki, KAWANISHI, Yasutomo, MURASE, Hiroshi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers 01.06.2020; Japan Science and Technology Agency
• Subjects: Cameras; Coordinates; data association; Datasets; Feature extraction; Mathematical analysis; multiple human tracking; Multiple target tracking; omnidirectional camera
• ISSN: 0916-8532; 1745-1361
• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2019MVP0009

Multiple human tracking is widely used in various fields such as marketing and surveillance. The typical approach associates human detection results between consecutive frames using the features and bounding boxes (position+size) of detected humans. Some methods use an omnidirectional camera to cover a wider area, but ID switch often occurs in association with detections due to following two factors: i) The feature is adversely affected because the bounding box includes many background regions when a human is captured from an oblique angle. ii) The position and size change dramatically between consecutive frames because the distance metric is non-uniform in an omnidirectional image. In this paper, we propose a novel method that accurately tracks humans with an association metric for omnidirectional images. The proposed method has two key points: i) For feature extraction, we introduce local rectification, which reduces the effect of background regions in the bounding box. ii) For distance calculation, we describe the positions in a world coordinate system where the distance metric is uniform. In the experiments, we confirmed that the Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) improved 3.3 in the LargeRoom dataset and improved 2.3 in the SmallRoom dataset.