People detection in surveillance: classification and evaluation

Nowadays, people detection in video surveillance environments is a task that has been generating great interest. There are many approaches trying to solve the problem either in controlled scenarios or in very specific surveillance applications. The main objective of this study is to give a comprehensive and extensive evaluation of the state of the art of people detection regardless of the final surveillance application. For this reason, first, the different processing tasks involved in the automatic people detection in video sequences have been defined, then a proper classification of the state of the art of people detection has been made according to the two most critical tasks, object detection and person model, that are needed in every detection approach. Finally, experiments have been performed on an extensive dataset with different approaches that completely cover the proposed classification and support the conclusions drawn from the state of the art.