Human activity analysis in a 3D bird’s-eye view

Abstract

Efficient and reliable human tracking in arbitrary environments is challenging, as there is currently no single solution that can successfully handle all scenarios. In this paper we present a novel approach that uses a top view 3D camera, which employs a simplified yet expressive human body model for effective multi-target detection and tracking. Both bottom-up and high level processes are involved to construct a saliency map with selective visual information. We handle the tracking task in a hierarchical data association framework, and a novel salience occupancy pattern (SOP) descriptor is proposed as the motion representation for action recognition. Our real-time bird’s-eye multiperson tracking and recognition approach is being applied in a human-computer interaction (HCI) research prototype, and has a wide range of applications.