TOF imaging in Smart room environments towards improved people tracking

In this paper we present the use of time-of-flight (TOF) cameras in smart-rooms and how this leads to improved results in segmenting the people in the room from the background and consequently better 3D reconstruction of the people. A calibrated rig of one Swissranger SR3100 time-of-flight range camera and a high resolution standard camera is set in a smart-room consisting of 5 other standard cameras. A probabilistic background model is used to segment each view and a shape from silhouette 3D volume is constructed. It is shown that the presence of the range camera gives ways of eliminating regional artifacts and therefore a more robust input for higher level applications such people tracking or human motion analysis.