Interacting object tracking in crowded urban areas

Tracking in crowded urban areas is a daunting task. High crowdedness causes challenging data association problems. Different motion patterns from a wide variety of moving objects make motion modeling difficult. Accompanying with traditional motion modeling techniques, this paper introduces a scene interaction model and a neighboring object interaction model to respectively take long-term and short-term interactions between the tracked objects and its surroundings into account. With the use of the interaction models, anomalous activity recognition is accomplished easily. In addition, movestop hypothesis tracking is applied to deal with move-stopmove maneuvers. AU these approaches are seamlessly intergraded under the variable-structure multiple-model estimation framework. The proposed approaches have been demonstrated using data from a laser scanner mounted on the PALI robot at a crowded intersection. Interacting pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, cars and trucks are successfully tracked in difficult situations with occlusion.