Target Tracking Using a Joint Acoustic Video System

In this paper, a multitarget tracking system for collocated video and acoustic sensors is presented. We formulate the tracking problem using a particle filter based on a state-space approach. We first discuss the acoustic state-space formulation whose observations use a sliding window of direction-of-arrival estimates. We then present the video state space that tracks a target's position on the image plane based on online adaptive appearance models. For the joint operation of the filter, we combine the state vectors of the individual modalities and also introduce a time-delay variable to handle the acoustic-video data synchronization issue, caused by acoustic propagation delays. A novel particle filter proposal strategy for joint state-space tracking is introduced, which places the random support of the joint filter where the final posterior is likely to lie. By using the Kullback-Leibler divergence measure, it is shown that the joint operation of the filter decreases the worst case divergence of the individual modalities. The resulting joint tracking filter is quite robust against video and acoustic occlusions due to our proposal strategy. Computer simulations are presented with synthetic and field data to demonstrate the filter's performance