Vehicle Tracking in Occlusion and Clutter

Vehicle tracking in environments containing occlusion and clutter is an active research area. The problem of tracking vehicles through such environments presents a variety of challenges. These challenges include vehicle track initialization, tracking an unknown number of targets and the variations in real-world lighting, scene conditions and camera vantage. Scene clutter and target occlusion present additional challenges. A stochastic framework is proposed which allows for vehicles tracks to be identified from a sequence of images. The work focuses on the identification of vehicle tracks present in transportation scenes, namely, vehicle movements at intersections. The framework combines background subtraction and motion history based approaches to deal with the segmentation problem. The tracking problem is solved using a Monte Carlo Markov Chain Data Association (MCMCDA) method. The method includes a novel concept of including the notion of discrete, independent regions in the MCMC scoring function. Results are presented which show that the framework is capable of tracking vehicles in scenes containing multiple vehicles that occlude one another, and that are occluded by foreground scene objects.