Detecting and tracking people in real time with RGB-D camera

We propose a novel approach to automatic detection and tracking of people taking different poses in cluttered and dynamic environments using a single RGB-D camera. The original RGB-D pixels are transformed to a novel point ensemble image (PEI), and we demonstrate that human detection and tracking in 3D space can be performed very effectively with this new representation. The detector in the first phase quickly locates human physiquewise plausible candidates, which are then further carefully filtered in a supervised learning and classification second phase. Joint statistics of color and height are computed for data association to generate final 3D motion trajectories of tracked individuals. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results obtained on the publicly available office dataset, mobile camera dataset and the real world clothing store dataset we created show very promising results. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.