INFLUENCE OF AN EXPLICITLY MODELED 3D SCENE ON THE TRACKING OF PARTIALLY OCCLUDED VEHICLES

Model-based tracking of vehicles in real world image sequences of traf fic may fail due to different reasons, A careful analysis of failed tr acking experiments brought to light that one of these phenomena consis ts in an incorrect match of parts of the vehicle model to image featur es belonging to other scene components, This effect appears in particu lar if the vehicle is occluded by either stationary scene components o r by another moving vehicle, Although we got some encouraging results when we modeled the occluding scene components explicitly, we still en countered cases in which we did not succeed in tracking partially occl uded vehicles properly, In this contribution we show some successful t racking results obtained from real world image sequences and discuss t he cases of failures, Additionally, we present a framework for the con ceptual characterization of occurring occlusions which became amenable to experimental analysis in the course of our investigations. (C) 199 7 Academic Press.