Visual Tracking of Pedestrians Jointly using Wi-Fi Location System on Distributed Camera Network

Object tracking with multiple cameras is a fundamental problem in wide-area surveillance application, but it has difficulties to achieve accurate and stable performance because of disjoint shot areas or initial object identification problems. We propose a novel object tracking method which jointly uses estimated location information of the target derived from a set of Wi-Fi signal strength values with video images from cameras. Apart from sensor fusion techniques proposed in the past which use another kind of sensors (eg., global positioning system (GPS), pressure sensors on the floors to detect foot steps, laser-range scanners, etc), our approach can cover wide-areas both indoor and outdoor in low cost because of propagation characteristics of Wi-Fi signals. Particle filtering is applied to achieve tracking the target from video images, with this Wi-Fi location estimation. This paper describes system architectures and the experimental results of the pedestrian tracking technique with Wi-Fi location estimation.