Title: A Causal And-Or Graph Model for Visibility Fluent Reasoning in Tracking Interacting Objects,
Abstract: Tracking humans that are interacting with the other subjects or environment
remains unsolved in visual tracking, because the visibility of the human of
interests in videos is unknown and might vary over time. In particular, it is
still difficult for state-of-the-art human trackers to recover complete human
trajectories in crowded scenes with frequent human interactions. In this work,
we consider the visibility status of a subject as a fluent variable, whose
change is mostly attributed to the subject's interaction with the surrounding,
e.g., crossing behind another object, entering a building, or getting into a
vehicle, etc. We introduce a Causal And-Or Graph (C-AOG) to represent the
causal-effect relations between an object's visibility fluent and its
activities, and develop a probabilistic graph model to jointly reason the
visibility fluent change (e.g., from visible to invisible) and track humans in
videos. We formulate this joint task as an iterative search of a feasible
causal graph structure that enables fast search algorithm, e.g., dynamic
programming method. We apply the proposed method on challenging video sequences
to evaluate its capabilities of estimating visibility fluent changes of
subjects and tracking subjects of interests over time. Results with comparisons
demonstrate that our method outperforms the alternative trackers and can
recover complete trajectories of humans in complicated scenarios with frequent
human interactions.