Activity Monitoring Made Easier by Smart 360-degree Cameras

This paper proposes the use of smart 360-degree cameras for activity monitoring. By exploiting the geometric properties of these cameras and adopting off-the-shelf tracking algorithms adapted to equirectangular images, this paper shows how simple it becomes deploying a camera network, and detecting the presence of pedestrians in predefined regions of interest with minimal information on the camera, namely its height. The paper further shows that smart 360-degree cameras can enhance motion understanding in the environment and proposes a simple method to estimate the heatmap of the scene to highlight regions where pedestrians are more often present. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.