Tracking of persons for video surveillance of unattended environments

This paper describes a visual surveillance system for remote monitoring of unattended environments. For the purpose of efficiently tracking multiple people in the presence of occlusions, we propose: (i) to combine blob matching with particle filtering, and (ii) to augment these tracking algorithms with a novel colour appearance model. The proposed system efficiently counteracts the shortcomings of the two algorithms by switching from one to the other during occlusions. Results on public datasets as well as real surveillance videos from a metropolitan railway station demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system.