3D Position Estimation of a Person of Interest in Multiple Video Sequences : People Detection

Abstract: In most cases today when a specific person's whereabouts is monitored through video surveillance it is done manually and his or her location when not seen is based on assumptions on how fast he or she can move. Since humans are good at recognizing people this can be done accurately, given good video data, but the time needed to go through all data is extensive and therefore expensive. Because of the rapid technical development computers are getting cheaper to use and therefore more interesting to use for tedious work. This thesis is a part of a larger project that aims to see to what extent it is possible to estimate a person of interest's time dependent 3D position, when seen in surveillance videos. The surveillance videos are recorded with non overlapping monocular cameras. Furthermore the project aims to see if the person of interest's movement, when position data is unavailable, could be predicted. The outcome of the project is a software capable of following a person of interest's movement with an error estimate visualized as an area indicating where the person of interest might be at a specific time. This thesis main focus is to implement and evaluate a people detector meant to be used in the project, reduce noise in position measurement, predict the position when the person of interest's location is unknown, and to evaluate the complete project. The project combines known methods in computer vision and signal processing and the outcome is a software that can be used on a normal PC running on a Windows operating system. The software implemented in the thesis use a Hough transform based people detector and a Kalman filter for one step ahead prediction. The detector is evaluated with known methods such as Miss-rate vs. False Positives per Window or Image (FPPW and FPPI respectively) and Recall vs. 1-Precision. The results indicate that it is possible to estimate a person of interest's 3D position with single monocular cameras. It is also possible to follow the movement, to some extent, were position data are unavailable. However the software needs more work in order to be robust enough to handle the diversity that may appear in different environments and to handle large scale sensor networks.