A field model for human detection and tracking

Ying Wu*, Ting Yu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

64 Scopus citations

Abstract

The large shape variability and partial occlusions challenge most object detection and tracking methods for nonrigid targets such as pedestrians. This paper presents a new approach based on a two-layer statistical field model that characterizes the prior of the complex shape variations as a Boltzmann distribution and embeds this prior and the complex image likelihood into a Markov field. A probabilistic variational analysis of this model reveals a set of fixed-point equations characterizing the equilibrium of the field. It leads to computationally efficient methods for calculating the image likelihood and for training the model. Based on that, effective algorithms for detecting nonrigid objects are developed. This new approach has several advantages. First, it is intrinsically suitable for capturing local nonrigidity. In addition, due to the distributed likelihood, this approach is robust to partial occlusions. Moreover, the two-layer structure provides large flexibility of modeling the image observations, which makes the new method robust to clutters. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)753-765
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Volume28
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2006

Funding

This work was supported in part by US National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant IIS-0308222, IIS-0347877 (CAREER), Northwestern startup funds, and the Murphy Fellowships. The authors also greatly thank the reviewers for the constructive comments and suggestions.

Keywords

  • Image models
  • Machine learning
  • Markov random fields
  • Object detection
  • Probabilistic algorithms
  • Shape
  • Statistical computing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Applied Mathematics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A field model for human detection and tracking'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this