Data association and occlusion handling for vision-based people tracking by mobile robots

This paper presents an approach for tracking multiple persons on a mobile robot with a combination of colour and thermal vision sensors, using several new techniques. First, an adaptive colour model is incorporated into the measurement model of the tracker. Second, a new approach for detecting occlusions is introduced, using a machine learning classifier for pairwise comparison of persons (classifying which one is in front of the other). Third, explicit occlusion handling is incorporated into the tracker. The paper presents a comprehensive, quantitative evaluation of the whole system and its different components using several real world data sets. Key words: AdaBoost, Occlusion Detection, Thermal Vision, Colour Vision, Bayesian estimation

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: RAS
• Authors: Grzegorz Cielniak, Tom Duckett, Achim J. Lilienthal
• Keywords: Adaptive Colour Model, RAS 2010, Thermal Vision, Thermal Vision Sensors