Scalable Semi-Automatic Annotation for Multi-Camera Person Tracking.

This paper proposes a generic methodology for the semi-automatic generation of reliable position annotations for evaluating multi-camera people-trackers on large video data sets. Most of the annotation data are automatically computed, by estimating a consensus tracking result from multiple existing trackers and people detectors and classifying it as either reliable or not. A small subset of the data, composed of tracks with insufficient reliability, is verified by a human using a simple binary decision task, a process faster than marking the correct person position. The proposed framework is generic and can handle additional trackers. We present results on a data set of $sim 6$ h captured by 4 cameras, featuring a person in a holiday flat, performing activities such as walking, cooking, eating, cleaning, and watching TV. When aiming for a tracking accuracy of 60 cm, 80% of all video frames are automatically annotated. The annotations for the remaining 20% of the frames were added after human verification of an automatically selected subset of data. This involved $sim 2.4$ h of manual labor. According to a subsequent comprehensive visual inspection to judge the annotation procedure, we found 99% of the automatically annotated frames to be correct. We provide guidelines on how to apply the proposed methodology to new data sets. We also provide an exploratory study for the multi-target case, applied on the existing and new benchmark video sequences.

Human mobility monitoring in very low resolution visual sensor network.

This paper proposes an automated system for monitoring mobility patterns using a network of very low resolution visual sensors (30 × 30 pixels). The use of very low resolution sensors reduces privacy concern, cost, computation requirement and power consumption. The core of our proposed system is a robust people tracker that uses low resolution videos provided by the visual sensor network. The distributed processing architecture of our tracking system allows all image processing tasks to be done on the digital signal controller in each visual sensor. In this paper, we experimentally show that reliable tracking of people is possible using very low resolution imagery. We also compare the performance of our tracker against a state-of-the-art tracking method and show that our method outperforms. Moreover, the mobility statistics of tracks such as total distance traveled and average speed derived from trajectories are compared with those derived from ground truth given by Ultra-Wide Band sensors. The results of this comparison show that the trajectories from our system are accurate enough to obtain useful mobility statistics.