Vision-based 3D bicycle tracking using deformable part model and Interacting Multiple Model filter

This paper presents a monocular vision based 3D bicycle tracking framework for intelligent vehicles based on a detection method exploiting a deformable part model and a tracking method using an Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) algorithm. Bicycle tracking is important because bicycles share the road with vehicles and can move at comparable speeds in urban environments. From a computer vision standpoint, bicycle detection is challenging as bicycle´s appearance can change dramatically between viewpoints and a person riding on the bicycle is a non-rigid object. To this end, we present a tracking-by-detection method to detect and track bicycles that takes into account these difficult issues. First, a mixture model of multiple viewpoints is defined and trained via a Latent Support Vector Machine (LSVM) to detect bicycles under a variety of circumstances. Each model uses a part based representation. This robust bicycle detector provides a series of measurements (i.e., bounding boxes) in the context of the Kalman filter. Second, to exploit the unique characteristics of bicycle tracking, two motion models based on bicycle´s kinematics are fused using an IMM algorithm. For each motion model, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used to estimate the position and velocity of a bicycle in the vehicle coordinates. Finally, a single bicycle tracking method using an IMM algorithm is extended to that of multiple bicycle tracking by incorporating a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter which runs a particle filter for a data association and an IMM filter for each bicycle tracking. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through a series of experiments run on a new bicycle dataset captured from a vehicle-mounted camera.