Multiple Human Tracking in Non-Specific Coverage with Wearable Cameras

Compared to fixed cameras, wearable cameras have time-varying non-specific view coverage and can be used to alternately observe people at different sites by varying the camera views. However, such view change of wearable cameras may introduce intervals of transitional frames without useful information, which brings new challenge for the important multiple object tracking (MOT) task – existing MOT methods can not handle well frequent disappearing/reappearing targets in the field of view, especially in the presence of informationless transitional sequences of frames. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a Markov Decision Process with jump state (JMDP) to model the target’s lifetime in tracking, and use optical flow of the camera motion and the statistical information of the targets to model the camera state transition. We further develop a frame-level classification algorithm to locate the transitional sequence. By combining all of them, we formulate the proposed non-specific-coverage MOT problem as a joint state transition problem, which can be solved by the state transfer mechanism of the targets and the camera. We collect a new dataset for performance evaluation and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.