Real-time multitarget tracking by a cooperative distributed vision system

Target detection and tracking is one of the most important and fundamental technologies to develop real-world computer vision systems such as security and traffic monitoring systems. This paper first categorizes target tracking systems based on characteristics of scenes, tasks, and system architectures. Then we present a real-time cooperative multitarget tracking system. The system consists of a group of active vision agents (AVAs), where an AVA is a logical model of a network-connected computer with an active camera. All AVAs cooperatively track their target objects by dynamically exchanging object information with each other With this cooperative tracking capability, the system as a whole can track multiple moving objects persistently even under complicated dynamic environments in the real world. In this paper we address the technologies employed in the system and demonstrate their effectiveness.