Simultaneous Tracking and Activity Recognition

Many tracking problems involve several distinct objects interacting with each other. We develop a framework that takes into account interactions between objects allowing the recognition of complex activities. In contrast to classic approaches that consider distinct phases of tracking and activity recognition, our framework performs these two tasks simultaneously. In particular, we adopt a Bayesian standpoint where the system maintains a joint distribution of the positions, the interactions and the possible activities. This turns out to be advantegeous, as information about the ongoing activities can be used to improve the prediction step of the tracking, while, at the same time, tracking information can be used for online activity recognition. Experimental results in two different settings show that our approach 1) decreases the error rate and improves the identity maintenance of the positional tracking and 2) identifies the correct activity with higher accuracy than standard approaches.