Person tracking has become increasingly important for a series of military and civilian applications like security, surveillance, smart-environments, medicine and others. Typically to track a moving and/or speaking person in a cluttered environment we need to employ microphones or cameras that look for spatio-temporal changes in the data they collect from the monitored environment in order to detect and track people. Nevertheless, these standalone systems have limited success since environments are normally reverberant affecting the performance of the audio systems while the monitored space is often poorly lighted and crowded limiting the performance of the video systems. In this research proposal we envision a person tracking system that will combine new and robust versions of the stand-alone systems in order to provide accurate multi-modal location estimates in real-time. The data fusion mechanisms which will be investigated and employed, will resemble to a degree the way humans locate and track objects by using the cues provided by both our eyes and ears. This assumes development of new technologies that can detect the presence of speech,identify pre-specified objects of interest, attenuate the presence of competing speakers, enhance the lighting conditions, improve or restore the quality of image and speech etc. Employment of the system in realistic environments will ensure that the increased effectiveness of the multi-modality approach is demonstrated at the end of the project.
Project Supervisor
Tania Stathaki was born in Athens, Hellas. In September 1991 she received the Masters degree in Electronics and Computer Engineering from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and the Advanced Diploma in Classical Piano Performance from the Orfeion Athens Conservatory of Music. She received the Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing from Imperial College in September 1994. She is currently a Reader in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of Imperial College. Previously, she was Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems and Computing of Brunel University in UK, Visiting Lecturer in the Electrical Engineering Department of Mahanakorn University in Thailand and Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology Education and Digital Systems of the University of Pireus in Greece. Her current research interests lie in the areas of signal and image processing and computer vision.
