Robust novel multiple human tracking algorithm published in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

Video based multiple human tracking often involves several challenges including target number variation, object occlusions, and noise corruption in sensor measurements. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address these challenges based on probability hypothesis density (PHD) filtering with a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) implementation. More specifically, a novel social force model (SFM) for describing the interaction between the targets is used to calculate the likelihood within the MCMC resampling step in the prediction step of the PHD filter, and a one class support vector machine (OCSVM) is then used in the update step to mitigate the noise in the measurements,where the SVM is trained with features from both colour and oriented gradient histograms. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art techniques using sequences from the CAVIAR, TUD and PETS2009 datasets based on the mean Euclidean tracking error on each frame, the optimal subpattern assignment (OSPA) metric, and the multiple object tracking precision (MOTP) metric. The results show improved performance of the proposed method over the baseline algorithms including the traditional particle PHD filtering method, the traditional SFM based particle filtering method, multi-Bernoulli filtering and an online-learning based tracking method.