A Sequential Bayesian Algorithm for Surveillance With Nonoverlapping Cameras

Visual surveillance in wide areas (e.g. airports) relies on sparsely distributed cameras, that is, cameras that observe nonoverlapping scenes. In this setup, multiobject tracking requires reidentification of an object when it leaves one field of view, and later appears at some other. Although similar association problems are common for multiobject tracking scenarios, in the distributed case one has to cope with asynchronous observations and cannot assume smooth motion of the objects. In this paper, we propose a method for human indoor tracking. The method is based on a Dynamic Bayes Network (DBN) as a probabilistic model for the observations. The edges of the network define the correspondences between observations of the same object. Accordingly, we derive an approximate EM-like method for selecting the most likely structure of DBN and learning model parameters. The presented algorithm is tested on a collection of real-world observations gathered by a system of cameras in an office building.