The LAICA project: Experiments on Multicamera People Tracking and Logging

Logging information on moving objects is crucial in video surveillance systems. Distributed multi-camera systems can provide the appearance of objects/people from differentviewpoints and at different resolutions, allowing a more complete and precise logging of the information. This is achieved through consistent labeling to correlate collected information of the same person. This paper proposes a novel approach to consistent labeling also capable tofully characterize groups of people and to manage miss segmentations. The ground-plane homography and the epipolar geometry are automatically learned and exploited to warp objects’ principal axes between overlapped cameras. A MAP estimator that exploits two contributions (forward and backward) is used to choose the most probable label con£guration to be assigned at the handoff of a new object. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method in detecting single and simultaneous handoffs, miss segmentations, and groups.