Multiple camera collaboration strategies for dynamic object association

In this paper, we present and compare two different multiple camera collaboration strategies to reduce false association in finding the correspondence of objects. Collaboration matrices are defined with the required minimum separation for an effective collaboration because homographic lines for objects association are ineffective with the insufficient separation. The first strategy uses the collaboration matrices to select the best pair out of many cameras having the maximum separation to efficiently collaborate on the object association. The association information in selected cameras is propagated to unselected cameras by the global information constructed from the associated targets. While the first strategy requires the long operation time to achieve the high association rate due to the limited view by the best pair, it reduces the computational cost using homographic lines. The second strategy initiates the collaboration process of objects association for all the pairing cases of cameras regardless of the separation. In each collaboration process, only crossed targets by a transformed homographic line from the other collaborating camera generate homographic lines. While the repetitive association processes improve the association performance, the transformation processes of homographic lines increase exponentially. The proposed methods are evaluated with real video sequences and compared in terms of the computational cost and the association performance. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods effectively reduce the false association rate as compared with basic pair-wise collaboration.