A Real-Time Active Pedestrian Tracking System Inspired by the Human Visual System

Pedestrian detection and tracking play a significant role in surveillance. Despite the numerous detection and tracking methods proposed in the literature, when the pedestrian is too small to recognize, which is a common case in modern surveillance systems, all methods fail. In order to deal with such case, we propose an active pedestrian tracking system inspired by the human visual system. A coarse-to-fine pedestrian detection algorithm is proposed for the small pedestrian detection by combining the Gaussian mixture model background subtraction with the histogram of oriented gradient detection. In addition, a three-dimensional pan–tilt–zoom control model is presented, which requires no calibration and is more accurate than other control models. In order to actively track a pedestrian in real time, we utilize an active control algorithm and a tracking–learning–detection tracker. Experimental results demonstrate that our active tracking system is both efficient and effective.