A Vision System for Automated Customer Tracking for Marketing Analysis: Low Level Feature Extraction

We present the first stages of a system that tracks customers in a store with the goal of activity analysis. The ultimate goal is to provide a tool for making various marketing decisions. In this paper, we focus on the low level processing methods for determining the position of the customers in the store. We present a method to extract the low-level head coordinates to be further used for tracking customers in the crowded situations. The algorithm relies on the knowledge of image vanishing points that are used to compute a “vanishing point projection histogram” as well as to extract camera calibration parameters. Vanishing points and scale factor can be computed with the help of a simple interactive interface that we also present in this paper.