A real-time open-source video tracking system

Video tracking is used in military operations and homeland defense. Multiple cameras are mounted on an airplane that flies in a circle and points to a central location. The images are pre-registered and a single large image is sent to a ground station at the rate of a frame per second. The first step needed for tracking is measurements. The video undergoes additional registration and processing to produce multi-frame motion detections. These measurements are passed to the tracking algorithm. Tracking through an urban environment has its own unique challenges. Targets frequently cross paths, go behind one another, and go behind buildings or into shadowed areas. Additional challenges include Move-Stop-Move, parallax, and track association with highly similar targets. These challenges need to be overcome with up to a thousand vehicles, so processing speed is crucial. The project is Open-Source to aid in overcoming these technical challenges. Alternative trackers (IMM, MHT), features, association methods, track-initiation and deletion (M/N or LU), state variables, or other specialized routines (for Move-Stop-Move, parallax, etc.) will be tried and analyzed with representative data. By keeping it Open-Source, any ideas to improve the system can be easily implemented and analyzed. This paper presents current findings and state of the project.