Tracking in a Dense Crowd Using Multiple Cameras

Tracking people in a dense crowd is a challenging problem for a single camera tracker due to occlusions and extensive motion that make human segmentation difficult. In this paper we suggest a method for simultaneously tracking all the people in a densely crowded scene using a set of cameras with overlapping fields of view. To overcome occlusions, the cameras are placed at a high elevation and only people's heads are tracked. Head detection is still difficult since each foreground region may consist of multiple subjects. By combining data from several views, height information is extracted and used for head segmentation. The head tops, which are regarded as 2D patches at various heights, are detected by applying intensity correlation to aligned frames from the different cameras. The detected head tops are then tracked using common assumptions on motion direction and velocity. The method was tested on sequences in indoor and outdoor environments under challenging illumination conditions. It was successful in tracking up to 21 people walking in a small area (2.5 people per m(2)), in spite of severe and persistent occlusions.