Fusion of non-visual modalities into the Probabilistic Occupancy Map framework for person localization

In this paper we investigate the possibilities for fusion of non-visual sensor modalities into state-of-the-art vision-based framework for person detection and localization, the Probabilistic Occupancy Map (POM), with the aim of improving the frame-by-frame localization results in a realistic (cluttered) indoor environment. We point out the aspects that need to be considered when fusing non-visual sensor information into POM and provide a mathematical model for it. We demonstrate the proposed fusion method on the example of multi-camera and radio-based person localization setup. The performance of both systems is evaluated, showing their strengths and weaknesses. We show that localization results may be significantly improved by fusing the information from the radio-based system into the camera-based POM framework using the proposed model.