for this problem. This section specifically focuses on
the multicamera surveillance applications for overlap-
ping cameras and literature based on the ghost prun-
ing methods.
Registration of an object present across multiple
camera views can be used to estimate its location.
One common approach in these systems constraints
the search space to the ground plane using the planar
world assumption (Eshel and Moses, 2010; Fleuret
et al., 2007; Khan and Shah, 2009). Therefore, as-
suming that the objects do not float in the air, pla-
nar homographies are calculated for the ground plane.
Recent approaches extend this by using multiplanar
homographies combined with the ground plane but
this is not robust for several reasons such as the bad
foreground detections or the occlusion of the lower
part of the body.
Khan and Shah introduce the planar homographic
constraint at multiple planes and combine it with
graph cut segmentation to track people (Khan and
Shah, 2009). No calibration information is required
but planar references must be present in at least one
of the views and affine homography must be manually
computed by the user for each sequence. Their pro-
posed solution suffers from false positives or ghosts
due to the limitations of the homography constraint.
Khan and Shah account for ghosts using the space-
time occupancies. Eshel and Moses perform peo-
ple tracking in a dense, crowded environment using
homography constraints at the top layers combined
with the pixel intensity correlation and motion direc-
tion, velocity constraints (Eshel and Moses, 2010).
This method requires the use of partial calibration
data. Temporal information is used to reduce phan-
toms. But, the algorithm is limited to those sequences
in which heads are visible in a top view configura-
tion. Different from the first two techniques, Fleuret
et al. define a probabilistic occupancy map based on a
quantized ground plane along with a distance measure
in relation to the multiview projections (Fleuret et al.,
2007). They further integrate it with Hidden Markov
Model (HMM) for joint color, motion and occupancy
modeling to perform tracking. However, this algo-
rithm is limited to tracking up to a maximum of six
people, performs poorly in dense situations and fails
to account for height variations like the detection of
children. More recently, Utasi and Benedek introduce
novel features, a 3D configuration model and its opti-
mization in order to perform multicamera people de-
tection (Utasi and Benedek, 2011; Utasi and Benedek,
2012).
In parallel with the complete detection or track-
ing systems, research also focuses on resolving more
fundamental issues such as ghosts. Ren et al. define
ghosts as the false positives due to the intersections of
non-corresponding regions (Ren et al., 2012). They
propose to use color template matching for ghost
pruning. But, as we will show later, their method
is unable to account for views with high variations
in the color constancy. Moreover, their equations are
limited to only two views. Unlike (Ren et al., 2012),
our proposed algorithm has no limitation in the num-
ber of views, number of planes used and is able to
account for views which lack color constancy. Evans
et al. introduced a suppression map technique which
is able to predict the possible location of the ghosts
based on the scene geometry but it requires prior in-
formation about the location of the objects of interest
which is obtained from the previous frames (Evans
et al., 2012). Unlike this method, our proposed tech-
nique does not require any temporal information.
The novelty of our method is to perform ghost
pruning without using temporal information. We also
account for color constancy variations and our algo-
rithm can work across more than two camera views
by taking into account the planes at several heights
of the body, not just the top. Our algorithm has been
tested on the City Center sequence of the PETS 2009
dataset using three overlapping camera views (PETS,
2009). The results show significant reduction in the
number of ghosts, including a comparison with (Ren
et al., 2012). Besides this, we achieve detection rates
which are better than the Probability Occupancy Map
(POM) detector module of (Fleuret et al., 2007) and
results comparable to one of the more recent multi-
camera people detector in (Utasi and Benedek, 2012).
3 MULTIPLANAR PROJECTIONS
AND SYNERGY MAP
The multiplanar projection algorithm as proposed in
(Utasi and Benedek, 2012) is used. The inputs for the
algorithm are the foreground masks F
v
(x,y) of each
view v. Instead of using the Mixture of Gaussians
(MoG), as employed by Utasi and Benedek, our fore-
ground masks are obtained using the more robust mul-
tilayer background subtraction method as proposed in
(Yao and Odobez, 2007). Next, the multiplanar pro-
jections are used to create the synergy map as ex-
plained in the following two sections.
3.1 Multiplanar Projections
The camera calibration model is used to project the
silhouettes obtained by background subtraction to
the ground plane and the planes parallel to it. If
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