For various services in a building it is advantageous to monitor a persons whereabouts and sometimes even a track of the persons movement. For a Ph D thesis CAAD collaborates on use of a video tracker with the Computer Vision Lab (http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/).
The tracking algorithm by CVL uses a background segmentation as base. A picture showing the empty scene is reduced from any consecutively arriving
picture. The resulting difference is an object or person that has not been there before. The geometric information on the detected and tracked object
is available as bounding box for other applications. Torsten Spindler of CAAD checks the trackers behaviour in different situations. What happens
with a semi variable background, e.g. a window with birds flying around or trees rocking in the wind. What happens with mirror images on semi-mirroring
surfaces as windows. The results of these expirements are given to CVL to further improve the tracker. Currently tracking is limited to one object
and CVLs plans are to expand this to multiple objects even when located in crowds of people.
