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Integrated Tracking

Our integration method is designed to take advantage of each module's strengths: range is typically fast but coarse, color is fast and prone to false positives, and face pattern detection is slow and requires canonical pose and expression. We place priority on face detection hits, when available, and use color or range to update position from frame to frame.

For each range silhouette, we collect the range, color, and face detection candidate head features. As described above, when a candidate pattern detection head overlaps with a range or color candidate head, it persists and follows the range or color region. We record the relative offset of the face detection head with respect to the range or color head, and maintain that relationship in subsequent frames. This has the desired effect of allowing face detection to discriminate between head and hand regions in subsequent frames even when there may not be another face detection for several frames.

For each frame, we compute the location of a user's head on the range silhouette as follows: if a face detection candidate head is present, we return it; otherwise we return any location with overlapping range and color candidates, the location of the range candidate, or the location of a color candidate, in order of preference.

There is one special case in propagating face detection candidate heads. If the two color regions split or merge as described above, we take steps to allow the virtual face detection candidate head to follow the appropriate color region. We assume that the face is stationary between frames when deciding what color region to follow. If two regions have merged, the virtual detection follows the merged region, with offset such that the face's absolute position on the screen is the same as the previous frame. If two regions have split, the face follows the region closest to it's position in the previous frame. These heuristics are simple, but work in many cases where users are intermittently touching their face with their hands.

When the head location has been found, we update the estimate of head size. We have found that color is a relatively unreliable estimator of size; instead, we recompute size based on the results of the face detector and the range modules. When a face detection result has been found, we use it to determine the real size of the face. If no face detection hit has been found, we use an average model of real face size.

Our system can be configured in two modes: single- or multiple-person tracking. Singe-person mode is most appropriate for interactive games or kiosks which are restricted to a single user; multiple-person is more appropriate for general surveillance and monitoring applications. In single person mode, we return only a single range silhouette; we initially choose the closest range region, and then follow that region until it is no longer tracked in the short-term.


previous up next
Next: Long-term tracking Up: Integrated person tracking using Previous: Mode-specific processing
Trevor Darrell
9/9/1998