Object triangulation, 3-D object tracking, feature correspondence, and camera calibration are key problems for estimation from camera networks. This paper addresses these problems within a unified Bayesian framework for joint multi-object tracking and sensor registration. Given that using standard filtering approaches for state estimation from cameras is problematic, an alternative parametrisation is exploited, called disparity space. The disparity space-based approach for triangulation and object tracking is shown to be more effective than non-linear versions of the Kalman filter and particle filtering for non-rectified cameras. The approach for feature correspondence is based on the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) filter, and hence inherits the ability to update without explicit measurement association, to initiate new targets, and to discriminate between target and clutter. The PHD filtering approach then forms the basis of a camera calibration method from static or moving objects. Results are shown on simulated data.
@cite_7: Inferring scene geometry and camera motion from a stream of images is possible in principle, but is an ill-conditioned problem when the objects are distant with respect to their size. We have developed a factorization method that can overcome this difficulty by recovering shape and motion under orthography without computing depth as an intermediate step. An image stream can be represented by the 2FxP measurement matrix of the image coordinates of P points tracked through F frames. We show that under orthographic projection this matrix is of rank 3. Based on this observation, the factorization method uses the singular-value decomposition technique to factor the measurement matrix into two matrices which represent object shape and camera rotation respectively. Two of the three translation components are computed in a preprocessing stage. The method can also handle and obtain a full solution from a partially filled-in measurement matrix that may result from occlusions or tracking failures. The method gives accurate results, and does not introduce smoothing in either shape or motion. We demonstrate this with a series of experiments on laboratory and outdoor image streams, with and without occlusions.
In practice, a calibration object is not always available and hence the stratified approach, which relies only on the information extracted from the images, is more appropriate. Projective calibration is usually achieved by structure-from-motion techniques @cite_7 which unrealistically assume perfect knowledge of measurement correspondences as an input to the calibration process. This in turn means that such projective calibration implicitly assumes that the estimated correspondences were updated with the correct measurements and the corresponding points are known in at least a certain number of images. The possibility of incorrect data association or correspondence is not considered as such cases are pruned from the input data and similarly, the possibility of incorrect estimation of the number of correspondences is also not considered. As a consequence, useful information is removed from the input data before the calibration process even begins.