This article is part of the series Embedded Vision System.

Open Access Research Article

Autonomous Multicamera Tracking on Embedded Smart Cameras

Markus Quaritsch1*, Markus Kreuzthaler1, Bernhard Rinner1, Horst Bischof2 and Bernhard Strobl3

Author Affiliations

1 Institute for Technical Informatics, Graz University of Technology, Graz 8010, Austria

2 Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology, Graz 8010, Austria

3 Video and Safety Technology, Austrian Research Centers GmbH, Wien 1220, Austria

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EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems 2007, 2007:092827 doi:10.1155/2007/92827


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jes.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/092827


Received:28 April 2006
Revisions received:19 September 2006
Accepted:30 October 2006
Published:24 January 2007

© 2007 Quaritsch et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

There is currently a strong trend towards the deployment of advanced computer vision methods on embedded systems. This deployment is very challenging since embedded platforms often provide limited resources such as computing performance, memory, and power. In this paper we present a multicamera tracking method on distributed, embedded smart cameras. Smart cameras combine video sensing, processing, and communication on a single embedded device which is equipped with a multiprocessor computation and communication infrastructure. Our multicamera tracking approach focuses on a fully decentralized handover procedure between adjacent cameras. The basic idea is to initiate a single tracking instance in the multicamera system for each object of interest. The tracker follows the supervised object over the camera network, migrating to the camera which observes the object. Thus, no central coordination is required resulting in an autonomous and scalable tracking approach. We have fully implemented this novel multicamera tracking approach on our embedded smart cameras. Tracking is achieved by the well-known CamShift algorithm; the handover procedure is realized using a mobile agent system available on the smart camera network. Our approach has been successfully evaluated on tracking persons at our campus.

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