Robust Real-Time Tracking of Multiple Objects by Volumetric Mass Densities

Combining foreground images from multiple views by projecting them onto a common ground-plane has been recently applied within many multi-object tracking approaches. These planar projections introduce severe artifacts and constrain most approaches to objects moving on a common 2D ground-plane. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the concept of an occupancy volume - exploiting the full geometry and the objects´ center of mass - and develop an efficient algorithm for 3D object tracking. Individual objects are tracked using the local mass density scores within a particle filter based approach, constrained by a Voronoi partitioning between nearby trackers. Our method benefits from the geometric knowledge given by the occupancy volume to robustly extract features and train classifiers on-demand, when volumetric information becomes unreliable. We evaluate our approach on several challenging real-world scenarios including the public APIDIS dataset. Experimental evaluations demonstrate significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods, while achieving real-time performance.