Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB 
Short description of the project
Automated people tracking is finding its way into more and more areas of daily life and industrial environments. With the knowledge about the position of all persons, position-related information can be provided or new types of interaction possibilities can be created. In order to be able to cover large areas in particular, systems are needed that can evaluate multiple camera streams in real time and uniformly locate people within them. The system for multi-camera person tracking developed at IOSB was implemented in the Elbedome Magdeburg, where it is now used to locate all persons in the room and have the application displayed on the screen react to the positions.
Person tracking in the Mixed Reality lab
The Elbedome in Magdeburg is a mixed reality lab for the large-scale presentation of interactive visualisations, in which users can be immersively transported into different scenarios thanks to a 360° full projection. In order to interact intuitively with the projection, it must be possible to react to the position of the people in the dome. The positions of the persons are also necessary for a correct perspective projection.
Find out more about the Mixed Reality lab here.
Multi-camera person tracking
For this purpose, the person tracking designed at Fraunhofer IOSB was adapted and further developed in this project. Due to the modular inventory architecture, the system could be quickly set up and adapted to the new conditions. The purely camera-based system is able to detect an unlimited number of people and clusters of people in the room and localise their position on the floor space across all camera views. For the use case, the cameras were mounted on the ceiling with a vertical view downwards and thus capture the entire floor area in their entirety.
The image streams of the camera network are transmitted via a gigabit network to commercially available PCs, where they are evaluated in real time. The capture results are processed and made available for the respective application in the Elbedome.
