Object tracking by non-overlapping distributed camera network

Abstract

People Tracking is a problem of great interest for wide areas video surveillance systems. In these large areas, it is not possible for a single camera to observe the complete area of interest. Surveillance systems architecture requires algorithms with the ability to track objects while observing them through multiple cameras. We focus our work on multi camera tracking with non overlapping fields of view (FOV). In particular we propose a multi camera architecture for wide area surveillance and a real time people tracking algorithm across non overlapping cameras. In this scenario it is necessary to track object both in intra-camera and inter-camera FOV. We consider these problems in this paper. In particular we have investigated different techniques to evaluate intra-camera and inter-camera tracking based on color histogram. For the intra-camera tracking we have proposed different methodologies to extract the color histogram information from each object patches. For inter-camera tracking we have compared different methods to evaluate the colour Brightness Transfer Function (BTF) between non overlapping cameras. These approaches are based on color histogram mapping between pairs of images of the same object in different FOVs. Therefore we have combined different methodology to calculate the color histogram in order to estimate different colour BTF performances. Preliminary results demonstrates that the proposed method combined with BTF outperform the performance in terms of matching rate between different cameras. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.