An efficient system for vehicle tracking in multi-camera networks

Abstract

The recent deployment of very large-scale camera networks has led to a unique version of the tracking problem whose goal is to detect and track every vehicle within a large urban area. To address this problem we exploit constraints inherent in urban environments (i.e. while there are often many vehicles, they follow relatively consistent paths) to create novel visual processing tools that are highly efficient in detecting cars in a fixed scene and at connecting these detections into partial tracks.We derive extensions to a network flow based probabilistic data association model to connect these tracks between cameras. Our real time system is evaluated on a large set of ground-truthed traffic videos collected by a network of seven cameras in a dense urban scene.