Urban Tracker: Multiple object tracking in urban mixed traffic

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of detecting and tracking multiple objects of various types in outdoor urban traffic scenes. This problem is especially challenging due to the large variation of road user appearances. To handle that variation, our system uses background subtraction to detect moving objects. In order to build the object tracks, an object model is built and updated through time inside a state machine using feature points and spatial information. When an occlusion occurs between multiple objects, the positions of feature points at previous observations are used to estimate the positions and sizes of the individual occluded objects. Our Urban Tracker algorithm is validated on four outdoor urban videos involving mixed traffic that includes pedestrians, cars, large vehicles, etc. Our method compares favorably to a current state of the art feature-based tracker for urban traffic scenes on pedestrians and mixed traffic.