Localizing people in multi-view environment using height map reconstruction in real-time

•Our method is applicable in case of non-planar ground (height map is computed).•Our method produces results comparable to SoA methods (for planar ground).•Our method can run real-time (distributed implementation is also possible).

In this article we address the problem of visual people localization, based on the detection of their feet. Localization is based on searching cone intersections. The altitude of location is also retrieved, which eliminates the need of planar ground – which is a common restriction in the related literature. We found that positions can be computed accurately, and despite a large number of false positives, the height map of the scene can be reconstructed with small error. Precision of the detector can be increased given the height map, so that results of our method are comparable to state of the art methods in case of planar ground, but adding the ability to handle arbitrary ground. Our algorithm is capable of real-time operation, based on two optimizations: decreasing the number of cones, and approximating intersection bodies. Cones are back-projections of ellipses in images covering feet regions. Moreover, most demanding steps are parallelizable, and distributable due to lack of data dependencies.