Tracking Social Groups Within and Across Cameras

We propose a method for tracking groups from single and multiple cameras with disjointed fields of view. Our formulation follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm in which groups are the atomic entities and are linked over time to form long and consistent trajectories. To this end, we formulate the problem as a supervised clustering problem in which a structural SVM classifier learns a similarity measure appropriate for group entities. Multicamera group tracking is handled inside the framework by adopting an orthogonal feature encoding that allows the classifier to learn inter- and intra-camera feature weights differently. Experiments were carried out on a novel annotated group tracking data set, the DukeMTMC-Groups data set. Since this is the first data set on the problem, it comes with the proposal of a suitable evaluation measure. Results of adopting learning for the task are encouraging, scoring a +15% improvement in F
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measure over a nonlearning-based clustering baseline. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal of its kind dealing with multicamera group tracking.