Visual Tracking on the Ground - A Comparative Analysis

Tracking is an important field in visual surveillance systems. Trackers have been applied traditionally in the image, but a new concept of tracking has been used gradually, applying the tracking on the ground map of the surrounding area. The purpose of this article is to compare both alternatives and prove that this new usage makes possible to obtain a higher performance and a minimization of the projective effects. Moreover, it provides the concept of multi-camera as a new tool for mobile object tracking in surveillance scenes, because a common reference system can be defined without increasing complexity. An automatic camera re-calibration procedure is also proposed, which avoids some practical limitations of the approach.