Real-time Multiple Pedestrians Tracking for Embedded Smart Visual Systems

Even though so much progresses have been achieved in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), most of reported MOT methods are not still satisfactory for commercial embedded products like Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera. In this paper, we propose a real-time multiple pedestrians tracking method for embedded environments. First, we design a new light weight convolutional neural network(CNN)-based pedestrian detector, which is constructed to detect even small size pedestrians, as well. For further saving of processing time, the designed detector is applied for every other frame, and Kalman filter is employed to predict pedestrians' positions in frames where the designed CNN-based detector is not applied. The pose orientation information is incorporated to enhance object association for tracking pedestrians without further computational cost. Through experiments on Nvidia's embedded computing board, Jetson TX2, it is verified that the designed pedestrian detector detects even small size pedestrians fast and well, compared to many state-of-the-art detectors, and that the proposed tracking method can track pedestrians in real-time and show accuracy performance comparably to performances of many state-of-the-art tracking methods, which do not target for operation in embedded systems.