A platform for monitoring aspects of human presence in real-time

Abstract

In this paper, the design and implementation of a hardware/software platform for parallel and distributed multiview vision processing is presented. The platform is focused at supporting the monitoring of human presence in indoor environments. Its architecture is focused at increased throughput through process pipelining as well as at reducing communication costs and hardware requirements. Using this platform, we present efficient implementations of basic visual processes such as person tracking, textured visual hull computation and head pose estimation. Using the proposed platform multiview visual operations can be combined and third-party ones integrated, to ultimately facilitate the development of interactive applications that employ visual input. Computational performance is benchmarked comparatively to state of the art and the efficacy of the approach is qualitatively assessed in the context of already developed applications related to interactive environments. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.