Multiple human detection in depth images

Most human detection algorithms in depth images perform well in detecting and tracking the movements of a single human object. However, their performance is rather poor when the person is occluded by other objects or when there are multiple humans present in the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel human detection technique which analyzes the edges in depth image to detect multiple people. The proposed technique detects a human head through a fast template matching algorithm and verifies it through a 3D model fitting technique. The entire human body is extracted from the image by using a simple segmentation scheme comprising a few morphological operators. Our experimental results on three large human detection datasets and the comparison with the state-of-the-art method showed an excellent performance achieving a detection rate of 94.53% with a small false alarm of 0.82%.