Learning the Semantic Landscape: embedding scene knowledge in object tracking

The accuracy of object tracking methodologies can be significantly improved by utilizing knowledge about the monitored scene. Such scene knowledge includes the homography between the camera and ground planes and the occlusion landscape identifying the depth map associated with the static occlusions in the scene. Using the ground plane, a simple method of relating the projected height and width of people objects to image location is used to constrain the dimensions of appearance models. Moreover, trajectory modeling can be greatly improved by performing tracking on the ground-plane tracking using global real-world noise models for the observation and dynamic processes. Finally, the occlusion landscape allows the tracker to predict the complete or partial occlusion of object observations. To facilitate plug and play functionality, this scene knowledge must be automatically learnt. The paper demonstrates how, over a sufficient length of time, observations from the monitored scene itself can be used to parameterize the semantic landscape. (C) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.