Tracking of dolphins in a basin using a constrained motion model

Visual animal tracking is a challenging problem generally requiring extended target models, group tracking and handling of clutter and missed detections. Furthermore, the dolphin tracking problem we consider includes basin constraints, shadows, limited field of view and rapidly changing light conditions. We describe the whole pipeline of a solution based on a ceiling-mounted fisheye camera that includes foreground segmentation and observation extraction in each image, followed by a target tracking framework. A novel contribution is a potential field model of the basin edges as a part of the motion model, that provides a robust prediction of the dolphin trajectories in phases with long segments of missed detections. The overall performance on real data is quite promising.