Detection and tracking of multiple pedestrians by using laser range scanners

We propose a novel system for tracking multiple pedestrians in a crowded scene by exploiting single-row laser range scanners that measure distances of surrounding objects. A walking model is built to describe the periodicity of the movement of the feet in the spatial-temporal domain, and a mean-shift clustering technique in combination with spatial- temporal correlation analysis is applied to detect pedestrians. Based on the walking model, particle filter is employed to track multiple pedestrians. Compared with camera-based methods, our system provides a novel technique to track multiple pedestrians in a relatively large area. The experiments, in which over 300 pedestrians were tracked in 5 minutes, show the validity of the proposed system.