Abstract
Automated people tracking is important for a wide range
of applications. However, typical surveillance cameras are controversial
in their use, mainly due to the harsh intrusion of the tracked individuals’ privacy. In this paper, we explore a privacy-preserving alternative
for multi-target tracking. A network of infrared sensors attached to the
ceiling acts as a low-resolution, monochromatic camera in an indoor environment. Using only this low-level information about the presence of
a target, we are able to reconstruct entire trajectories of several people. Inspired by the recent success of offline approaches to multi-target
tracking, we apply an energy minimization technique to the novel
setting of infrared motion sensors. To cope with the very weak data term
from the infrared sensor network we track in a continuous state space
with soft, implicit data association. Our experimental evaluation on both
synthetic and real-world data shows that our principled method clearly
outperforms previous techniques.