Pedestrian Tracking with Monocular Camera using Unconstrained 3D Motion Model

A first-principle single-object model is proposed for pedestrian tracking. It is assumed that the extent of the moving object can be described via known statistics in 3D, such as pedestrian height. The proposed model thus need not constrain the object motion in 3D to a common ground plane, which is usual in 3D visual tracking applications. A nonlinear filter for this model is implemented using the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and tested using the publicly available MOT-17 dataset. The proposed solution yields promising results in 3D while maintaining excellent results when projected into the 2D image. Moreover, the estimation error covariance matches the true one. Unlike conventional methods, the introduced model parameters have convenient meaning and can readily be adjusted for a problem.