A Novel Evidence Accumulation Framework For Robust Multi-Camera Person Detection

We propose a novel evidence accumulation framework that accurately estimates the positions of humans in a 3D environment. The framework consists of a network of distributed agents having different functionalities. The modular structure of the network allows scalability to large surveillance areas and robust operation. The framework does not assume reliable measurements in single cameras (referred to as 'sensing agents' in our framework) or reliable communication between different agents. There is a position uncertainty associated with single camera measurements and it is reduced through an uncertainty reducing transform that performs evidence accumulation using multiple camera measurements. Our framework has the advantage that single camera measurements do not need to be temporally synchronized to perform evidence accumulation. The system has been tested for detecting single and multiple humans in the environment. We conducted experiments to evaluate the localization accuracy of the position estimates obtained from the system by comparing them with the ground truth. Also, two different configurations of the agents were tested to compare their detection performance.