Large-Scale Person Detection and Localization Using Overhead Fisheye Cameras

Lu Yang, Liulei Li, Xueshi Xin, Yifan Sun, Qing Song, Wenguan Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 19961-19971

Location determination finds wide applications in daily life. Instead of existing efforts devoted to localizing tourist photos captured by perspective cameras, in this article, we focus on developing person positioning solutions using overhead fisheye cameras. Such solutions are advantageous in large field of view (FOV), low cost, anti-occlusion, and unaggressive work mode (without the necessity of cameras carried by persons). However, related studies are quite scarce, due to the paucity of data. To stimulate research in this exciting area, we present LOAF, the first large-scale overhead fisheye dataset for person detection and localization. LOAF is built with many essential features, e.g., i) the data cover abundant diversities in scenes, human pose, density, and location; ii) it contains currently the largest number of annotated pedestrian, i.e., 600K bounding boxes with ground-truth location information; iii) the body-boxes are labeled as radius-aligned so as to fully address the positioning challenge. To approach localization, we build a fisheye person detection network, which exploits the fisheye distortions by a clever position embedding strategy and is trained to predict radius-aligned human boxes end-to-end. Then, the actual locations of the detected persons are calculated by a numerical solution on the fisheye model and camera altitude data. Extensive experiments on LOAF validate the superiority of our fisheye detector w.r.t. previous methods, and show that our whole fisheye positioning solution is able to locate all persons in FOV with an accuracy of 0.5m, within 0.1s. Our dataset and code shall be released.