Disjoint Particle Filter to Track Multiple Objects in Real-time

Multi-target tracking is the main purpose of many video surveillance applications. Recently, multi-target tracking based on the particle filter method has achieved robust results by using the data association process. However, this method requires many calculations and it is inadequate for real time applications, because the number of associations exponentially increases with the number of measurements and targets. In this paper, to reduce the computational cost of the data association process, we propose a novel multi-target tracking method that excludes particle samples in the overlapped predictive region between the target to track and marginal targets. Moreover, to resolve the occlusion problem, we define an occlusion mode with the normal dynamic mode. When the targets are occluded, the mode is switched to the occlusion mode and the samples are propagated by Gaussian noise without the sampling process of the particle filter. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed multi-target tracking method even in occlusion.