Multiple human tracking is widely used in various fields such as marketing and surveillance. The typical approach associates human detection results between consecutive frames using the features and bounding boxes (position+size) of detected humans. Some methods use an omnidirectional camera to cover a wider area, but ID switch often occurs in association with detections due to following two factors: i) The feature is adversely affected because the bounding box includes many background regions when a human is captured from an oblique angle. ii) The position and size change dramatically between consecutive frames because the distance metric is non-uniform in an omnidirectional image. In this paper, we propose a novel method that accurately tracks humans with an association metric for omnidirectional images. The proposed method has two key points: i) For feature extraction, we introduce local rectification, which reduces the effect of background regions in the bounding box. ii) For distance calculation, we describe the positions in a world coordinate system where the distance metric is uniform. In the experiments, we confirmed that the Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) improved 3.3 in the LargeRoom dataset and improved 2.3 in the SmallRoom dataset.

The goal of this paper is to present a critical survey of existing literature on an omnidirectional sensing. The area of vision application such as autonomous robot navigation, telepresence and virtual reality is expanding by use of a camera with a wide angle of view. In particular, a real-time omnidirectional camera with a single center of projection is suitable for analyzing and monitoring, because we can easily generate any desired image projected on any designated image plane, such as a pure perspective image or a panoramic image, from the omnidirectional input image. In this paper, I review designs and principles of existing omnidirectional cameras, which can acquire an omnidirectional (360 degrees) field of view, and their applications in fields of autonomous robot navigation, telepresence, remote surveillance and virtual reality.