Tracking humans with ceiling-mounted downwards-pointing webcams

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Sounds quite interesting.

How would you obtain (or define) the head model? Would it be done online or offline?

Could you point me in the direction of more information, examples, OpenCV documentation, etc.?

I still consider myself a somewhat novice in regards to computer vision, and I have little experience with machine learning, so please bear over with me :)

My approach would be to collect data and start trying to create a self made cascade of weak classifiers which can be used to detect objects using the Viola & Jones approach. Two interesting links for this will be:

• http://docs.opencv.org/modules/objdetect/doc/cascade_classification.html?highlight=viola%20jones

• http://docs.opencv.org/doc/user_guide/ug_traincascade.html?highlight=viola%20jones

But the best think still is to read a lot of documentation and papers concerning the problem. It helps you to get a decent insight in the problem. I have been active on this forum for the sole purpose of getting a better insight in my research :) and I can tell you that it actually helps to look deeper into these problems out of interest.

Thank you! I will look into that. Looking through research papers can sometimes be a bit overwhelming because often I don't know what a particular subject matter is called in more technical terms. For example it took me some time to figure out that the problems I was experiencing with tracking was called "fragmentation" (an object being broken into several blobs) and "grouping" (multiple objects appearing as a single blob). But you are right, research is key :)