In the past decade many robots were deployed in the wild, and people detection and tracking is an important component of such deployments. On top of that, one often needs to run modules which analyze persons and extract higher level attributes such as age and gender, or dynamic information like gaze and pose. The latter ones are especially necessary for building a reactive, social robot-person interaction. In this paper, we combine those components in a fully modular detection-tracking-analysis pipeline, called DetTA. We investigate the benefits of such an integration on the example of head and skeleton pose, by using the consistent track ID for a temporal filtering of the analysis modules' observations, showing a slight improvement in a challenging real-world scenario. We also study the potential of a so-called “free-flight” mode, where the analysis of a person attribute only relies on the filter's predictions for certain frames. Here, our study shows that this boosts the runtime dramatically, while the prediction quality remains stable. This insight is especially important for reducing power consumption and sharing precious (GPU-)memory when running many analysis components on a mobile platform, especially so in the era of expensive deep learning methods.
Full detection-tracking pipelines for robotic scenarios have recently been described and evaluated in @cite_41 , including two nearest-neighbor methods @cite_27 @cite_28 , the Multi-Hypothesis Tracker of Arras @cite_0 and a vision-based MDL-tracker @cite_40 . In the area of computer vision, the MOTChallenge @cite_45 @cite_20 gives a good overview of recent image-based tracking methods, but many of those are not designed for robotics purposes as they are not capable of running online.
@cite_41 @cite_28 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_27 @cite_45 @cite_20
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Tracking people is a key technology for robots and intelligent systems in human environments. Many person detectors, filtering methods and data association algorithms for people tracking have been proposed in the past 15+ years in both the robotics and computer vision communities, achieving decent tracking performances from static and mobile platforms in real-world scenarios. However, little effort has been made to compare these methods, analyze their performance using different sensory modalities and study their impact on different performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a fully integrated real-time multi-modal laser RGB-D people tracking framework for moving platforms in environments like a busy airport terminal. We conduct experiments on two challenging new datasets collected from a first-person perspective, one of them containing very dense crowds of people with up to 30 individuals within close range at the same time. We consider four different, recently proposed tracking methods and study their impact on seven different performance metrics, in both single and multi-modal settings. We extensively discuss our findings, which indicate that more complex data association methods may not always be the better choice, and derive possible future research directions. All currently used mobile robot platforms are able to navigate safely through their environment, avoiding static and dynamic obstacles. However, in human populated environments mere obstacle avoidance is not sufficient to make humans feel comfortable and safe around robots. To this end, a large community is currently producing human-aware navigation approaches to create a more socially acceptable robot behaviour. Amajorbuilding block for all Human-Robot Spatial Interaction is the ability of detecting and tracking humans in the vicinity of the robot. We present a fully integrated people perception framework, designed to run in real-time on a mobile robot. This framework employs detectors based on laser and RGB-D data and a tracking approach able to fuse multiple detectors using different versions of data association and Kalman filtering. The resulting trajectories are transformed into Qualitative Spatial Relations based on a Qualitative Trajectory Calculus, to learn and classify different encounters using a Hidden Markov Model based representation. We present this perception pipeline, which is fully implemented into the Robot Operating System (ROS), in a small proof of concept experiment. All components are readily available for download, and free to use under the MIT license, to researchers in all fields, especially focussing on social interaction learning by providing different kinds of output, i.e. Qualitative Relations and trajectories. We present an approach to laser-based people tracking using a multi-hypothesis tracker that detects and tracks legs separately with Kalman filters, constant velocity motion models, and a multi-hypothesis data association strategy. People are defined as high-level tracks consisting of two legs that are found with little model knowledge. We extend the data association so that it explicitly handles track occlusions in addition to detections and deletions. Additionally, we adapt the corresponding probabilities in a situation-dependent fashion so as to reflect the fact that legs frequently occlude each other. Experimental results carried out with a mobile robot illustrate that our approach can robustly and efficiently track multiple people even in situations of high levels of occlusion. In the recent past, the computer vision community has developed centralized benchmarks for the performance evaluation of a variety of tasks, including generic object and pedestrian detection, 3D reconstruction, optical flow, single-object short-term tracking, and stereo estimation. Despite potential pitfalls of such benchmarks, they have proved to be extremely helpful to advance the state of the art in the respective area. Interestingly, there has been rather limited work on the standardization of quantitative benchmarks for multiple target tracking. One of the few exceptions is the well-known PETS dataset, targeted primarily at surveillance applications. Despite being widely used, it is often applied inconsistently, for example involving using different subsets of the available data, different ways of training the models, or differing evaluation scripts. This paper describes our work toward a novel multiple object tracking benchmark aimed to address such issues. We discuss the challenges of creating such a framework, collecting existing and new data, gathering state-of-the-art methods to be tested on the datasets, and finally creating a unified evaluation system. With MOTChallenge we aim to pave the way toward a unified evaluation framework for a more meaningful quantification of multi-target tracking. Standardized benchmarks are crucial for the majority of computer vision applications. Although leaderboards and ranking tables should not be over-claimed, benchmarks often provide the most objective measure of performance and are therefore important guides for reseach. Recently, a new benchmark for Multiple Object Tracking, MOTChallenge, was launched with the goal of collecting existing and new data and creating a framework for the standardized evaluation of multiple object tracking methods. The first release of the benchmark focuses on multiple people tracking, since pedestrians are by far the most studied object in the tracking community. This paper accompanies a new release of the MOTChallenge benchmark. Unlike the initial release, all videos of MOT16 have been carefully annotated following a consistent protocol. Moreover, it not only offers a significant increase in the number of labeled boxes, but also provides multiple object classes beside pedestrians and the level of visibility for every single object of interest.