Multi-View ML Object Tracking with Online Learning on Riemannian Manifolds by Combining Geometric Constraints

Journal article, 2013

This paper addresses issues in object tracking with occlusion scenarios, where multiple uncalibrated cameras with overlapping fields of view are exploited. We propose a novel method where tracking is first done independently in each individual view and then tracking results are mapped from different views to improve the tracking jointly. The proposed tracker uses the assumptions that objects are visible in at least one view and move uprightly on a common planar ground that may induce a homography relation between views. A method for online learning of object appearances on Riemannian manifolds is also introduced. The main novelties of the paper include: (a) define a similarity measure, based on geodesics between a candidate object and a set of mapped references from multiple views on a Riemannian manifold; (b) propose multiview maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of object bounding box parameters, based on Gaussian-distributed geodesics on the manifold; (c) introduce online learning of object appearances on the manifold, taking into account of possible occlusions; (d) utilize projective transformations for objects between views, where parameters are estimated from warped vertical axis by combining planar homography, epipolar geometry and vertical vanishing point; (e) embed single-view trackers in a three-layer multi-view tracking scheme. Experiments have been conducted on videos from multiple uncalibrated cameras, where objects contain long-term partial/full occlusions, or frequent intersections. Comparisons have been made with three existing methods, where the performance is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively. Results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of robustness against tracking drift caused by occlusions.