Pedestrian tracking from a stationary camera using active deformable models

The system proposed in this paper uses active deformable models to track pedestrians moving in dynamic real-world scenes. First, figure pixels are separated from a fixed or slowly evolving ground image. Then, an initial segmentation process identifies interesting pixel blobs for tracking. The output of the segmentation process is used to choose the starting position of the control points of the active deformable model. Once tracking has begun, the control points are updated at frame rates by minimizing an energy function involving the relative position of model points, image data, and the characteristics of figure pixels.