A real-time person tracking system based on SiamMask network for intelligent video surveillance

Real-time video surveillance systems are widely deployed in various environments, including public areas, commercial buildings, and public infrastructures. Person detection is a key and crucial task in different video surveillance applications, such as person detection, segmentation, and tracking. Researchers presented different image processing and artificial intelligence-based approaches (including machine and deep learning) for person detection and tracking, but mainly comprised of frontal view camera perspective. A real-time person tracking and segmentation system is introduced in this work, using an overhead camera perspective. The system applied a deep learning-based algorithm, i.e., SiamMask, a simple, versatile, fast, and surpassing other real-time tracking algorithms. The algorithm also performs segmentation of the target person by combining a mask branch to the fully convolutional twin neural network for target or person tracking. First, the person video sequences are obtained from an overhead perspective, and then additional training is performed with the help of transfer learning. Finally, a comparison is performed with other tracking algorithms. The SiamMask algorithm delivers good results, with a tracking accuracy of 95%.