Where are My Colleagues and Why? Tracking Multiple Persons in Indoor Environments

Imagine an office environment equipped with infrared presence sensors for light control as modern buildings offer. Several persons might be moving in this environment independently from each other. Potential questions arising here are: Which rooms are occupied?", "How many persons are in room 123?", or "Where is John?". In this paper we present an information fusion approach based on causal models. Prior knowledge is used to solve the simultaneous identification and multi target tracking problem. Based on an experimental setting, we show that the proposed approach enables tracking up to five persons. Furthermore, we discuss potential applications in the domain of fire service or monitoring of elderly people.