Tracking hand-off in large surveillance networks

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of pairwise camera overlap estimates for supporting target tracking across large networks of surveillance cameras. We compare the use of camera overlap topology information to a method based on matching target appearance histograms, and also evaluate the effect of combining both methods. Tracking accuracy results are reported in terms of precision and recall for a 24 camera network. Camera overlap information is shown to deliver significant advantages for tracking when compared with simply matching target appearance histograms, due to its robustness to low quality imagery. We show empirically that this is the case even for automatically derived overlap estimates containing errors.