How can I detect and track people using OpenCV?

Question

I have a camera that will be stationary, pointed at an indoors area. People will walk past the camera, within about 5 meters of it. Using OpenCV, I want to detect individuals walking past - my ideal return is an array of detected individuals, with bounding rectangles.

I've looked at several of the built-in samples:

• None of the Python samples really apply
• The C blob tracking sample looks promising, but doesn't accept live video, which makes testing difficult. It's also the most complicated of the samples, making extracting the relevant knowledge and converting it to the Python API problematic.
• The C 'motempl' sample also looks promising, in that it calculates a silhouette from subsequent video frames. Presumably I could then use that to find strongly connected components and extract individual blobs and their bounding boxes - but I'm still left trying to figure out a way to identify blobs found in subsequent frames as the same blob.

Is anyone able to provide guidance or samples for doing this - preferably in Python?

Answer 1

The latest SVN version of OpenCV contains an (undocumented) implementation of HOG-based pedestrian detection. It even comes with a pre-trained detector and a python wrapper. The basic usage is as follows:

from cv import *

storage = CreateMemStorage(0)
img = LoadImage(file)  # or read from camera

found = list(HOGDetectMultiScale(img, storage, win_stride=(8,8),
                padding=(32,32), scale=1.05, group_threshold=2))

So instead of tracking, you might just run the detector in each frame and use its output directly.

See src/cvaux/cvhog.cpp for the implementation and samples/python/peopledetect.py for a more complete python example (both in the OpenCV sources).