Multi-camera Computer Vision for Object Tracking: A comparative study

Background: Video surveillance is a growing area where it can help with deterring crime, support investigation or to help gather statistics. These are just some areas where video surveillance can aid society. However, there is an improvement that could increase the efficiency of video surveillance by introducing tracking. More specifically, tracking between cameras in a network. Automating this process could reduce the need for humans to monitor and review since the tracking can track and inform the relevant people on its own. This has a wide array of usability areas, such as forensic investigation, crime alerting, or tracking down people who have disappeared. Objectives: What we want to investigate is the common setup of real-time multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) systems. Next up, we want to investigate how the components in an MTMCT system affect each other and the complete system. Lastly, we want to see how image enhancement can affect the MTMCT. Methods: To achieve our objectives, we have conducted a systematic literature review to gather information. Using the information, we implemented an MTMCT system where we evaluated the components to see how they interact in the complete system. Lastly, we implemented two image enhancement techniques to see how they affect the MTMCT. Results: As we have discovered, most often, MTMCT is constructed using a detection for discovering object, tracking to keep track of the objects in a single camera and a re-identification method to ensure that objects across cameras have the same ID. The different components have quite a considerable effect on each other where they can sabotage and improve each other. An example could be that the quality of the bounding boxes affect the data which re-identification can extract. We discovered that the image enhancement we used did not introduce any significant improvement. Conclusions: The most common structure for MTMCT are detection, tracking and re-identification. From our finding, we can see that all the component affect each other, but re-identification is the one that is mostly affected by the other components and the image enhancement. The two tested image enhancement techniques could not introduce enough improvement, but other image enhancement could be used to make the MTMCT perform better. The MTMCT system we constructed did not manage to reach real-time