A joint system for person tracking and face detection

Visual detection and tracking of humans in complex scenes is a challenging problem with a wide range of applications, for example surveillance and human-computer interaction. In many such applications, time-synchronous views from multiple calibrated cameras are available, and both frame-view and space-level human location information is desired. In such scenarios, efficiently combining the strengths of face detection and person tracking is a viable approach that can provide both levels of information required and improve robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel vision system that detects and tracks human faces automatically, using input from multiple calibrated cameras. The method uses an Adaboost algorithm variant combined with mean shift tracking applied on single camera views for face detection and tracking, and fuses the results on multiple camera views to check for consistency and obtain the three-dimensional head estimate. We apply the proposed system to a lecture scenario in a smart room, on a corpus collected as part of the CHIL European Union integrated project. We report results on both frame-level face detection and three-dimensional head tracking. For the latter, the proposed algorithm achieves similar results with the IBM "PeopleVision" system.