Tracking Groups of People in Video Surveillance

In this master thesis, the problem of tracking groups using an image sequence dataset is examined. Target tracking can be defined as the problem of estimating a target’s state given prior knowledge about its motion and some sensor measurements related to the target’s state. A popular method for target tracking is e.g. the Kalman filter. However, the Kalman filter is insufficient when there are multiple targets in the scene. Consequently, alternative multitarget tracking methods must be applied along with methods for estimating the number of targets in the scene. Multitarget tracking can however be difficult when there are many unresolved targets, e.g. associating observations with targets in dense crowds. A viable simplification is group target tracking, keeping track of groups rather than individual targets. Furthermore, group target tracking is preferred when the user wants to know the motion and extension of a group in e.g. evacuation scenarios. To solve the problem of group target tracking in video surveillance, a combination of gm-phd filtering and mean shift clustering is proposed. The gm-phd filter is an approximation of Bayes multitarget filter. Pedestrian detections converted into flat world coordinates from the image dataset are used as input to the filter. The output of the gm-phd filter consists of Gaussian mixture components with corresponding mean state vectors. The components are divided into groups by using mean shift clustering. An estimate of the number of members and group shape is presented for each group. The method is evaluated using both single camera measurements and two cameras partly surveilling the same area. The results are promising and present a nice visual representation of the groups’ characteristics. However, using two cameras gives no improvement in performance, probably due to differences in detections between the two cameras, e.g. a single pedestrian can be observed being at two positions several meters apart making it difficult to determine if it is a single pedestrian or multiple pedestrians.