Hough Forests Revisited: An Approach to Multiple Instance Tracking from Multiple Cameras

Georg Poier, Samuel Schulter, Sabine Sternig, Peter M. Roth, Horst Bischof

Abstract: Tracking multiple objects in parallel is a difficult task, especially if instances are interacting and occluding each other. To alleviate the arising problems multiple camera views can be taken into account, which, however, increases the computational effort. Evoking the need for very efficient methods, often rather simple approaches such as background subtraction are applied, which tend to fail for more difficult scenarios. Thus, in this work, we introduce a powerful multi-instance tracking approach building on Hough Forests. By adequately refining the time consuming building blocks, we can drastically reduce their computational complexity without a significant loss in accuracy. In fact, we show that the test time can be reduced by one to two orders of magnitude, allowing to efficiently process the large amount of image data coming from multiple cameras. Furthermore, we adapt the pre-trained generic forest model in an online manner to train an instance-specific model, making it well suited for multi-instance tracking. Our experimental evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed efficient Hough Forests for object detection as well as for the actual task of multi-camera tracking.