N-Ocular Stereo for Real-Time Human Tracking

Abstract

In recent years, various systems using multiple vision sensors have been proposed in the area of computer vision. For example, several systems track people or automobiles in the real environment with multiple vision sensors [32, 141, 169, 51, 189] while other systems analyze their behaviors [89]. Compared with systems using a single vision sensor [243, 116, 140, 156], these systems are able to observe a moving target in a large space for a long time. However, they need to use many vision sensors to seamlessly cover the entire space, since a single standard vision sensor itself has a narrow range of view. On the other hand, an omnidirectional vision sensor (ODVS) provides a wide field of view of up to a 360° at a time. In addition, use of multiple ODVSs provide rich and redundant visual information, which enables robust recognition of the targets. Thus, multiple ODVSs opens up a new application area of computer vision with their wide range of view.