Lab meeitng 22 Sep., 2006 (Bright): A Novel System for Tracking Pedestrains Using Multiple Single-Row Laser-Range Scanners

Authors: Huijing Zhao and Ryosuke Shibasaki

From: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 35, NO. 2, MARCH 2005

Abstract: In this research, we propose a novel system for
tracking pedestrians in a wide and open area, such as a shopping
mall and exhibition hall, using a number of single-row laser-range
scanners (LD-A), which have a profiling rate of 10 Hz and a
scanning angle of 270 . LD-As are set directly on the floor doing
horizontal scanning at an elevation of about 20 cm above the
ground, so that horizontal cross sections of the surroundings,
containing moving feet of pedestrians as well as still objects, are
obtained in a rectangular coordinate system of real dimension.
The data of moving feet are extracted through background subtraction
by the client computers that control each LD-A, and sent
to a server computer, where they are spatially and temporally integrated
into a global coordinate system. A simplified pedestrian’s
walking model based on the typical appearance of moving feet is
defined and a tracking method utilizing Kalman filter is developed
to track pedestrian’s trajectories. The system is evaluated through
both real experiment and computer simulation. A real experiment
is conducted in an exhibition hall, where three LD-As are used
covering an area of about 60 x 60 m2. Changes in visitors’ flow
during the whole exhibition day are analyzed, where in the peak
hour, about 100 trajectories are extracted simultaneously. On the
other hand, a computer simulation is conducted to quantitatively
examine system performance with respect to different crowd
density.

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