Spatial-Temporal Reasoning Based on Object Motion

This paper describes the continuing development of a system for tracking multiple man made objects, (typically vehicles) moving in a natural open world scene, where the detected motion is used to construct a structural representation of the scene. The system assumes no a priori knowledge of any structure within the image, but begins building a map of the scene on a frame by frame basis. The map shows regions in the image where vehicles are likely to be detected and regions where they are likely to become occluded. Tracking is complicated by the fact that the vehicles to be tracked are expected to be a large distance from the camera and as such will only occupy a small number of image pixels. The system has been tested using an input sequence of vehicles moving in a complex outdoor scene, where the vehicles undergo both full and partial occlusion.