The unscented Kalman filter for pedestrian tracking from a moving host

In this paper we present a time-efficient estimation framework for camera-based pedestrian tracking from a moving host car using a monocular camera. An image processing system processes the camera output to find the location of objects of interest in each frame. The position and sensor information about the host translation and rotation are passed to a tracking module. The module uses the position of the detected objectpsilas foot point as measurement input and connects them over time to estimate the movement of the objects of interest in order to reduce noise and single frame failures in the detection process. We have developed a new method to estimate the target movement which takes into account the host movement and allows to exploit prior information about the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. The basic idea is to assume that host and target movements can be modelled as 2-dimensional movements on a flat ground-plane. Our developed motion model is based on this assumption and includes host motion as well as the target ego motion. A measurement is modelled as a perspective projection of a point on the ground-plane to the image plane. The motion and the measurement model are combined by an unscented Kalman filter. This filter is relatively new and has not been applied for pedestrian tracking before. Finally, we present a new logical initialization strategy for the selected filter, a part that is left out by most other publications. First results indicate that our approach gives good tracking results and allows to track pedestrians from a moving host in real time.