Human Tracking in Top-View Fisheye Images: Analysis of Familiar Similarity Measures via HOG and against Various Color Spaces

The purpose of this paper is to find the best way to track human subjects in fisheye images by considering the most common similarity measures in the function of various color spaces as well as the HOG. To this end, we have relied on videos taken by a fisheye camera wherein multiple human subjects were recorded walking simultaneously, in random directions. Using an existing deep-learning method for the detection of persons in fisheye images, bounding boxes are extracted each containing information related to a single person. Consequently, each bounding box can be described by color features, usually color histograms; with the HOG relying on object shapes and contours. These descriptors do not inform the same features and they need to be evaluated in the context of tracking in top-view fisheye images. With this in perspective, a distance is computed to compare similarities between the detected bounding boxes of two consecutive frames. To do so, we are proposing a rate function ([Formula: see text]) in order to compare and evaluate together the six different color spaces and six distances, and with the HOG. This function links inter-distance (i.e., the distance between the images of the same person throughout the frames of the video) with intra-distance (i.e., the distance between images of different people throughout the frames). It enables ascertaining a given feature descriptor (color or HOG) mapped to a corresponding similarity function and hence deciding the most reliable one to compute the similarity or the difference between two segmented persons. All these comparisons lead to some interesting results, as explained in the later part of the article.