Publications

Tracking people is a key technology for robots and intelligent systems in human environments. Many person detectors, filtering methods and data association algorithms for people tracking have been proposed in the past 15+ years in both the robotics and computer vision communities, achieving decent tracking performances from static and mobile platforms in real-world scenarios. However, little effort has been made to compare these methods, analyze their performance using different sensory modalities and study their impact on different performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a fully integrated real-time multi-modal laser/RGB-D people tracking framework for moving platforms in environments like a busy airport terminal. We conduct experiments on two challenging new datasets collected from a first-person perspective, one of them containing very dense crowds of people with up to 30 individuals within close range at the same time. We consider four different, recently proposed tracking methods and study their impact on seven different performance metrics, in both single and multi-modal settings. We extensively discuss our findings, which indicate that more complex data association methods may not always be the better choice, and derive possible future research directions.

Many multi-object-tracking (MOT) techniques have been developed over the past years. The most successful ones are based on the classical tracking-by-detection approach. The different methods rely on different kinds of data association, use motion and appearance models, or add optimization terms for occlusion and exclusion. Still, errors occur for all those methods and a consistent evaluation has just started. In this paper we analyze three current state-of-the-art MOT trackers and show that there is still room for improvement. To that end, we train a classifier on the trackers' output bounding boxes in order to prune false positives. Furthermore, the different approaches have different strengths resulting in a reduced false negative rate when combined. We perform an extensive evaluation over ten common evaluation sequences and consistently show improved performances by exploiting the strengths and reducing the weaknesses of current methods.