Calibration-free camera hand-over for fast and reliable person tracking in multi-camera setups

Ensembles of multiple (active) cameras yield an important ingredient in modern tracking and surveillance applications. They overcome the limited fields-of-view of single cameras, however, require robust procedures for handing over tracking tasks from one camera to another. In this paper a calibration-free procedure is proposed that allows for fast and reliable camera hand-over in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) applications. The approach is based on online acquisition of scenario-specific target models and especially solves the problem of significant changes in object view during hand-over. Real-world results acquired in an AmI environment prove the effectiveness of our technique.