2.2 Track Prediction
This process deals with the motion prediction of the
tracked objects. As the Kalman filter provides an es-
timation of system states and a prediction, it has been
used to predict the position of the target in the new
frame, with a constant velocity model for the target.
The 3D position of each target is predicted using
a simple linear Kalman filter with a state vector x =
[X,Z,
˙
X,
˙
Z]
T
, and a measurement vector y = [X,Z]
T
.
The X and Z correspond to the 3D target position on
the ground plane and
˙
X,
˙
Z represent the corresponding
velocities.
2.3 Track Association
To solve the assignment problem, we consider firstly
an assignment matrix A
k
= [a
i, j
] where the entries a
i, j
have the following meaning: a
i, j
= 1, if and only if
Ob
k
i
can be assigned to track T
k−1
j
and, otherwise,
zero. Thus the assignment matrix indicates possi-
ble correspondence between tracks and detected ob-
jects through the 3D space depending on the mod-
eling of their description models. Due to the com-
plexity of the tracked objects, false correspondences
are inevitable, so our objective is to limit the false
correspondences to the minimum. In real situations,
many assignment conflicts may arise either because
multiple tracks compete for one detected object or be-
cause multiple detected objects fit correctly to a single
track. We adopt a uniqueness constraint stating that
one track uniquely matches one detected object.
Secondly, we define the cost matrix as C
k
= [c
i, j
]
where c
i, j
reflects the difference between the fea-
ture vector (position and intensity histogram) of a
track T
k−1
j
and the feature vector of a detected ob-
ject Ob
k
i
. It is computed using the target descrip-
tion model through the following measures (Medioni
et al., 2001):
c
i, j
=
Corr
i, j
1 + d
i, j
(1)
Where Corr
i, j
∈ [−1, 1], represents the correlation be-
tween the grey level histogram ( i.e. the appearance
model) of Ob
k
i
and that of T
k−1
j
. d
i, j
∈ [0,∞], is the
Euclidean distance in the 3D real world between the
position of Ob
k
i
and the predicted position of T
k−1
j
.
From this relation we note that c
i, j
≈ 0 for similar tar-
get models, while penalizing distant models.
The number of tracked objects can vary between
frames, i.e., while searching for smooth set of tracks
there is the possibility of obtaining different num-
ber of tracks in each frame. When the number of
tracks increases, then that means the appearance of
a new object. In the other hand a decreasing of tracks
means either occlusion, or the tracked object leaves
the scene.
Usually two objects are considered similar if and
only if their similarity degree is smaller than a prede-
fined threshold λ. In other words c
i, j
set to ∞ and a
i, j
set to 0 if c
i, j
≥ λ, where ∞ represents the non allowed
assignments.
2.4 Gating
In order to eliminate the unlikely correspondence and
to reduce the number of candidate we use the Gating
technique (Blackman and Popoli, 1999) (Bar-Shalom
and Blair, 2000). A gate is formed about the predicted
track position and all detected objects falling within
the gate are assumed to be potential candidates for as-
sociation with the given track. The value of the cost
matrix between the track with the other detected ob-
jects which failed the gate test will be set to ∞. We
consider the gating approach proposed in (Blackman
and Popoli, 1999), where a track is said to satisfy the
gate of a given track if the residual vector
˜
y, with
residual matrix s
k
= HP
k/k −1
H + R satisfy the rela-
tion:
|y − ˜y| ≤ 3σ (2)
where H is the measurement matrix, P
k
/k − 1 is
the covariance matrix, R is the noise covariance ma-
trix, σ =
q
σ
2
0
+ σ
2
p
is the residual standard deviation
of the measurement σ
0
and prediction σ
p
variances.
2.5 Track Description Model Update
To take into account the changes of the tracked ob-
ject over time, it is necessary to update the description
model according to target changes. Suppose that the
track T
k−1
j
with a description model Ψ
k−1
j
has been
assigned to the observed object Ob
k
i
which has a de-
scription model Ψ
k
i
, then the new description model
Ψ
k
j
of the track T
k
j
is calculated thanks to the follow-
ing relation (Nummiaro et al., 2003):
Ψ
k
j
= (1 − α)Ψ
k−1
j
+ αΨ
k
i
(3)
where α ∈ [0,1] weights the contribution of the ob-
served model. When α is small, the new model will
mainly depends on the old description model. This
case is suitable when there are no occlusions and
when the tracked object does not changes largely from
one frame to the next one. On the other hand, if α
is high, then the new description model will mainly
depends on the new observed description model;
this case is suitable when there are significant target
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