Moving objects tracking on the unit sphere using a multiple-camera system on a mobile robot

Abstract

Detection and tracking of moving objects with camera systems mounted on amobile robot presents a formidable problem since the ego-motion of the robot and the moving objects jointly form a challengingly discernible motion in the image. In this paper, we are concerned with multiple-camera systems, namely the Ladybug®2 camera, whose perspective images were used to detect motion and subsequently perform the tracking of multiple objects on the sphere. This enabled us to account for the continuity of the scene which is achieved by the sensor in an image stitching process on the sphere. The objects are tracked on the sphere with a Bayesian filter based on the von Mises–Fisher distribution and the data association is achieved by the global nearest neighbor method, for which the distance matrix is constructed by deriving the Rényi α-divergence for the vonMises–Fisher distribution. The prospects of the method are tested on a synthetic and real-world data experiments