Multiview Detection with Cardboard Human Modeling

Multiview detection uses multiple calibrated cameras with overlapping fields of views to locate occluded pedestrians. In this field, existing methods typically adopt a "human modeling - aggregation" strategy. To find robust pedestrian representations, some intuitively use locations of detected 2D bounding boxes, while others use entire frame features projected to the ground plane. However, the former does not consider human appearance and leads to many ambiguities, and the latter suffers from projection errors due to the lack of accurate height of the human torso and head. In this paper, we propose a new pedestrian representation scheme based on human point clouds modeling. Specifically, using ray tracing for holistic human depth estimation, we model pedestrians as upright, thin cardboard point clouds on the ground. Then, we aggregate the point clouds of the pedestrian cardboard across multiple views for a final decision. Compared with existing representations, the proposed method explicitly leverages human appearance and reduces projection errors significantly by relatively accurate height estimation. On two standard evaluation benchmarks, the proposed method achieves very competitive results.