A Sensor-based SLAM Algorithm for Camera Tracking in Virtual Studio

This paper addresses a sensor-based simultaneous localization and mapping （SLAM） algorithm for camera tracking in a virtual studio environment. The traditional camera tracking methods in virtual studios are vision-based or sensor-based. However, the chroma keying process in virtual studios requires color cues, such as blue background, to segment foreground objects to be inserted into images and videos. Chroma keying limits the application of vision-based tracking methods in virtual studios since the background cannot provide enough feature information. Furthermore, the conventional sensor-based tracking approaches suffer from the jitter, drift or expensive computation due to the characteristics of individual sensor system. Therefore, the SLAM techniques from the mobile robot area are first investigated and adapted to the camera tracking area. Then, a sensor-based SLAM extension algorithm for two dimensional （2D） camera tracking in virtual studio is described. Also, a technique called map adjustment is proposed to increase the accuracy＇ and efficiency of the algorithm. The feasibility and robustness of the algorithm is shown by experiments. The simulation results demonstrate that the sensor-based SLAM algorithm can satisfy the fundamental 2D camera tracking requirement in virtual studio environment.

Human tracking in camera network with non-overlapping FOVs

An adaptive human tracking method across spatially separated surveillance cameras with non-overlapping fields of views （FOVs） is proposed. The method relies on the two cues of the human appearance model and spatio-temporal information between cameras. For the human appearance model, an HSV color histogram is extracted from different human body parts （head, torso, and legs）, then a weighted algorithm is used to compute the similarity distance of two people. Finally, a similarity sorting algorithm with two thresholds is exploited to find the correspondence. The spatio- temporal information is established in the learning phase and is updated incrementally according to the latest correspondence. The experimental results prove that the proposed human tracking method is effective without requiring camera calibration and it becomes more accurate over time as new observations are accumulated.

A Sensor-Service Collaboration Approach for Target Tracking in Wireless Camera Networks

Mobile target tracking is a necessary function of some emerging application domains, such as virtual reality, smart home and intelligent healthcare. However, existing portable devices for target tracking are resource intensive and high-cost. Camera tracking is an effective location tracking way for those emerging applications which can reuse the existing ubiquitous video monitoring system. This paper proposes a dynamic community-based camera collaboration(D3C) framework for target location and tracking. The contributions of D3C mainly include that(1) nonlinear perspective projection model is selected as the camera sensing model and sequential Monte Carlo is employed to predict the target location;(2) a dynamic collaboration scheme is proposed, it is based on the local community-detection theory deriving from social network analysis. The performance of proposed approach is validated by both synthetic datasets and real-world application. The experiment results show that D3C meets the versatility, real-time and fault tolerance requirements of target tracking applications.

Survey of 3D modeling using depth cameras

Three-dimensional(3D)modeling is an important topic in computer graphics and computer vision.In recent years,the introduction of consumer-grade depth cameras has resulted in profound advances in 3D modeling.Starting with the basic data structure,this survey reviews the latest developments of 3D modeling based on depth cameras,including research works on camera tracking,3D object and scene reconstruction,and high-quality texture reconstruction.We also discuss the future work and possible solutions for 3D modeling based on the depth camera.

A robust system for real-time pedestrian detection and tracking

A real-time pedestrian detection and tracking system using a single video camera was developed to monitor pedestrians. This system contained six modules: video flow capture, pre-processing, movement detection, shadow removal, tracking, and object classification. The Gaussian mixture model was utilized to extract the moving object from an image sequence segmented by the mean-shift technique in the pre-processing module. Shadow removal was used to alleviate the negative impact of the shadow to the detected objects. A model-free method was adopted to identify pedestrians. The maximum and minimum integration methods were developed to integrate multiple cues into the mean-shift algorithm and the initial tracking iteration with the competent integrated probability distribution map for object tracking. A simple but effective algorithm was proposed to handle full occlusion cases. The system was tested using real traffic videos from different sites. The results of the test confirm that the system is reliable and has an overall accuracy of over 85%.

Fast and Simple Motion Tracking Unit with Motion Estimation

Smweillance system using active tracking camera has no distance limitation of surveillance range compared to supersonic or sound sensors. However, complex motion tracking algorithm requires huge amount of computation, and it often requires exfmasive DSPs or embedded processors. This paper proposes a novel motion tracking trait based on different image for fast and simple motion tracking. It uses configuration factor to avoid noise and inaccuracy. It reduces the required computation significantly, so as to be implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array（FFGAs ） instead of expensive Digital Signal Processing（DSPs）. It also performs calculation for motion estimation in video compression, so it can be easily combined with surveil system with video recording functionality based on video compression. The proposed motion tracking system implemented on Xilinx Vertex-4 FPGA can process 48 frames per second, and operating frequency of motion tracking trait is 100 MHz.

Ob ject Tracking with Dual Field-of-view Switching in Aerial Videos

Visual object tracking plays an important role in intelligent aerial surveillance by unmanned aerial vehicles（UAV）. In ordinary applications, aerial videos are captured by cameras with a fixed-focus lens or a zoom lens, for which the field-of-view（FOV）of the camera is fixed or smoothly changed. In this paper, a special application of the visual tracking in aerial videos captured by the dual FOV camera is introduced, which is different from ordinary applications since the camera quickly switches its FOV during the capturing. Firstly, the tracking process with the dual FOV camera is analyzed, and a conclusion is made that the critical part for the whole process depends on the accurate tracking of the target at the moment of FOV switching. Then, a cascade mean shift tracker is proposed to deal with the target tracking under FOV switching. The tracker utilizes kernels with multiple bandwidths to execute mean shift locating, which is able to deal with the abrupt motion of the target caused by FOV switching. The target is represented by the background weighted histogram to make it well distinguished from the background, and a modification is made to the weight value in the mean shift process to accelerate the convergence of the tracker. Experimental results show that our tracker presents a good performance on both accuracy and efficiency for the tracking. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to apply a visual object tracking method to the situation where the FOV of the camera switches in aerial videos.