Clothing Insulation Rate and Metabolic Rate Estimation for Individual Thermal Comfort Assessment in Real Life

Satisfactory indoor thermal environments can improve working efficiencies of office staff. To build such satisfactory indoor microclimates, individual thermal comfort assessment is important, for which personal clothing insulation rate (Icl) and metabolic rate (M) need to be estimated dynamically. Therefore, this paper proposes a vision-based method. Specifically, a human tracking-by-detection framework is implemented to acquire each person’s clothing status (short-sleeved, long-sleeved), key posture (sitting, standing), and bounding box information simultaneously. The clothing status together with a key body points detector locate the person’s skin region and clothes region, allowing the measurement of skin temperature (Ts) and clothes temperature (Tc), and realizing the calculation of Icl from Ts and Tc. The key posture and the bounding box change across time can category the person’s activity intensity into a corresponding level, from which the M value is estimated. Moreover, we have collected a multi-person thermal dataset to evaluate the method. The tracking-by-detection framework achieves a mAP50 (Mean Average Precision) rate of 89.1% and a MOTA (Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy) rate of 99.5%. The Icl estimation module gets an accuracy of 96.2% in locating skin and clothes. The M estimation module obtains a classification rate of 95.6% in categorizing activity level. All of these prove the usefulness of the proposed method in a multi-person scenario of real-life applications.

Individual Detection and Tracking of Group Housed Pigs in Their Home Pen Using Computer Vision

Modern welfare definitions not only require that the Five Freedoms are met, but animals should also be able to adapt to changes (i. e., resilience) and reach a state that the animals experience as positive. Measuring resilience is challenging since relatively subtle changes in animal behavior need to be observed 24/7. Changes in individual activity showed potential in previous studies to reflect resilience. A computer vision (CV) based tracking algorithm for pigs could potentially measure individual activity, which will be more objective and less time consuming than human observations. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of state-of-the-art CV algorithms for pig detection and tracking for individual activity monitoring in pigs. This study used a tracking-by-detection method, where pigs were first detected using You Only Look Once v3 (YOLOv3) and in the next step detections were connected using the Simple Online Real-time Tracking (SORT) algorithm. Two videos, of 7 h each, recorded in barren and enriched environments were used to test the tracking. Three detection models were proposed using different annotation datasets: a young model where annotated pigs were younger than in the test video, an older model where annotated pigs were older than the test video, and a combined model where annotations from younger and older pigs were combined. The combined detection model performed best with a mean average precision (mAP) of over 99.9% in the enriched environment and 99.7% in the barren environment. Intersection over Union (IOU) exceeded 85% in both environments, indicating a good accuracy of the detection algorithm. The tracking algorithm performed better in the enriched environment compared to the barren environment. When false positive tracks where removed (i.e., tracks not associated with a pig), individual pigs were tracked on average for 22.3 min in the barren environment and 57.8 min in the enriched environment. Thus, based on proposed tracking-by-detection algorithm, pigs can be tracked automatically in different environments, but manual corrections may be needed to keep track of the individual throughout the video and estimate activity. The individual activity measured with proposed algorithm could be used as an estimate to measure resilience.

The Impact of the Detector on the Performances of a Multi Person Tracking System

Background: Pedestrian detection and tracking is an important area of study in real-world applications such as mobile robots, human-computer interaction, video surveillance, pedestrian protection systems, etc. As a result, it has attracted the interest of the scientific community. Objective: Certainly, tracking people is critical for numerous utility areas which cover unusual situations detection, like vicinity evaluation and sometimes change direction in human gait and partial occlusions. Researchers primary focus is to develop surveillance system that can work in a dynamic environment, but there are major issues and challenges involved in designing such systems. So, it has become a major issue and challenge to design a tracking system that can be more suitable for such situations. To this end, this paper presents a comparative evaluation of the tracking-by-detection system along with the publicly available pedestrian benchmark databases. Method: Unlike recent works where the person detection and tracking are usually treated separately, our work explores the joint use of the popular Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) method and the relevant visual detectors. Consequently, the choice of the detector is an important factor in the evaluation of the system performance. Results: Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the tracking-by-detection system is closely related to the optimal selection of the detector and should be required prior to a rigorous evaluation. Conclusion: The study demonstrates how sensitive the system performance as a whole is to the challenging of the dataset. Furthermore, the efficiency of the detector and the detector-tracker combination are also depending on the dataset.

Real-Time Multiobject Tracking Based on Multiway Concurrency

This paper explored a pragmatic approach to research the real-time performance of a multiway concurrent multiobject tracking (MOT) system. At present, most research has focused on the tracking of single-image sequences, but in practical applications, multiway video streams need to be processed in parallel by MOT systems. There have been few studies on the real-time performance of multiway concurrent MOT systems. In this paper, we proposed a new MOT framework to solve multiway concurrency scenario based on a tracking-by-detection (TBD) model. The new framework mainly focuses on concurrency and real-time based on limited computing and storage resources, while considering the algorithm performance. For the former, three aspects were studied: (1) Expanded width and depth of tracking-by-detection model. In terms of width, the MOT system can support the process of multiway video sequence at the same time; in terms of depth, image collectors and bounding box collectors were introduced to support batch processing. (2) Considering the real-time performance and multiway concurrency ability, we proposed one kind of real-time MOT algorithm based on directly driven detection. (3) Optimization of system level—we also utilized the inference optimization features of NVIDIA TensorRT to accelerate the deep neural network (DNN) in the tracking algorithm. To trade off the performance of the algorithm, a negative sample (false detection sample) filter was designed to ensure tracking accuracy. Meanwhile, the factors that affect the system real-time performance and concurrency were studied. The experiment results showed that our method has a good performance in processing multiple concurrent real-time video streams.

Multiple Object Tracking using YOLO-based Detector

In computer vision, multiple object tracking (MOT) plays a crucial role in solving many important issues. A common approach of MOT is tracking by detection. Tracking by detection includes occlusions, motion prediction, and object re-identification. From the video frames, a set of detections is extracted for leading the tracking process. These detections are usually associated together for assigning the same identifications to bounding boxes holding the same target. In this article, MOT using YOLO-based detector is proposed. The authors’ method includes object detection, bounding box regression, and bounding box association. First, the YOLOv3 is exploited to be an object detector. The bounding box regression and association is then utilized to forecast the object’s position. To justify their method, two open object tracking benchmarks, 2D MOT2015 and MOT16, were used. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is comparable to several state-of-the-art tracking methods, especially in the impressive results of MOT accuracy and correctly identified detections.