Human tracking using distributed vision systems

We present a wide area human tracking method using distributed computer vision systems. Each vision system consists of a camera and an image processor and they are all connected through a computer network. In this paper, we propose a method for human tracking and for coordination of all the vision systems. The human tracking method works on each vision system and uses a type of model based template matching to track moving people at 15 frame/sec on a standard personal computer. Coordination between the vision systems is necessary to achieve consistent wide area tracking. We use a state transition map and several action rules to synchronize the image processing between systems. All the vision systems share the state transition map jointly and decide their own actions according to the action rules. We describe experimental results that show the validity of our approach