Binary matrix for pedestrian tracking in infrared images

The primary goal of this thesis is to present a robust low compute cost pedestrian tracking system for use with thermal infra-red images. Pedestrian tracking employs two distinct image analysis tasks, pedestrian detection and path tracking. This thesis will focus on benchmarking existing pedestrian tracking systems and using this to evaluate the proposed pedestrian detection and path tracking algorithm. The first part of the thesis describes the imaging system and the image dataset collected for evaluating pedestrian detection and tracking algorithms. The texture content of the images from the imaging system are evaluated using fourier maps following this the locations at which the dataset was collected are described. The second part of the thesis focuses on the detection and tracking system. To evaluate the performance of the tracking system, a time per target metric is described and is shown to work with existing tracking systems. A new pedestrian aspect ratio based pedestrian detection algorithm is proposed based on a binary matrix dynamically constrained using potential target edges. Results show that the proposed algorithm is effective at detecting pedestrians in infrared images while being less resource intensive as existing algorithms. The tracking system proposed uses deformable, dynamically updated codebook templates to track pedestrians in an infrared image sequence. Results show that this tracker performs as well as existing tracking systems in terms of accuracy, but requires fewer resources.