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Factory Tracker™:
Data Fusion for Video Tracking
The
Factory Tracker™ is a new system using machine vision and advanced data fusion to track
large numbers of moving objects.
Applications -
- Plant security
- Vehicle tracking
- Package tracking
- Work in progress tracking
- Time and motion studies
Contents
The
Moving Object Tracking Problem
In any industrial setting, the location of moving objects (including
vehicles, parts, packages, and people) is a vital component of management
information. Many problems could be immediately solved if only a plant could
know where everything was right now; and many others could be mitigated if
there were a complete and easily accessed record of where everything was in
the past.
Wagner Associates, in a research project for the U.S. Navy,
has developed the Factory Tracker™ system effectively and efficiently to solve
many of these problems for industry. The heart of the system is a
sophisticated data fusion system that
can take information from multiple, dissimilar sources and combine them
together in real time for an accurate picture of the surveillance area. This
software came from years of research in radar and electronic surveillance for
the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force AWACS.
Computer vision has several advantages for keeping track of objects and
their location, using various approaches:
- Motion Detection: Automatically detecting changes in an image and
analyzing those changes to determine the source and location of the motion.
- Object Recognition: Searching scenes for the presence of known
objects by their stored images. Image templates can be stored as direct
pixel images (such as for human faces) or as models of objects (such as
container chassis) to permit correction for parallax, distance, and size.
- Defect Recognition: Comparing detailed templates of objects with
images captured in real time to determine defects in manufacturing.
How
the Factory Tracker Works
The Factory Tracker™ uses an industrial video capture and machine vision
processor to collect NTSC outputs from multiple cameras (one such processor
can handle up to 16 cameras using split screen multiplexing) and to provide
object detection reports to a data fusion process. The machine vision
processor finds all moving objects in the scene of each camera and reports
those detections to the tracking processor.
| The machine vision processor only
detects moving objects. This screen shows the most recent detections
with a cross and past detections with dots. |
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It's the task of the tracking processor
to put the reports from multiple cameras together in a composite picture
of the scene. The tracking processor converts all the target locations
to horizontal coordinates and displays them on a plan view of the plant. |
The Factory Tracker™ can use any combinations of sensors to develop the
final moving target picture. ID sensors such as badge readers, RF tag readers,
and even voice authentication,
can be used to provide identification. Because of the effectiveness of the
tracking processor software, once an object's ID is determined by one of these
sensors, that ID will stay with the object record as long as it is in a camera
view somewhere in the plant.
System Diagram
The following diagram shows a typical installation of the Factory Tracker™.
Up to 16 cameras can be installed by using a multiplexer to put 4 views on
each screen. The Vision Processor cycles through all the views and sends
object detections to the Tracking Processor.
Because the Vision Processor uses sophisticated boards to extract object
detections, the CPU host can be used for other tasks such as monitoring badge
readers and other sensors, as well as system control.
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The Tracking Processor merges the reports from all the sensors including
video into a unified data picture of the area under surveillance. It can be
programmed to recognize certain activities, monitor movements in restricted
areas, or collect statistical data on designated objects. Based on detected
activities, it can create its own alerts or change the appearance of object
symbols on the CRT map.
The system can display object symbols and tags on its own CRT map or on a
customer-selected GIS.
Development of the Factory Tracker system by Wagner Associates was funded by a Phase
II SBIR program at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Virginia.
For more information, contact
Dr.
Peter D. McMorran at (757) 727-7700.
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