Hi-ROS: Open-source multi-camera sensor fusion for real-time people tracking

This paper presents Hi-ROS (Human Interaction in ROS), an open source framework focused on real-time accurate assessment of human motion. The system offers a series of tools to track multiple people in real-time by exploiting a calibrated camera network. No assumptions are made about the typology or number of cameras, nor about the body pose estimation algorithm used to extract the 3D poses of the people in the scene. The tools provided by Hi-ROS include a Skeleton Tracker to ensure temporal consistency of the detected poses, a Skeleton Merger to fuse the tracks from multiple cameras, thus limiting flickering phenomena, a Skeleton Optimizer to ensure limb length consistency, and a Skeleton Filter to perform real-time smoothing of the detected joint trajectories. Accuracy, tracking robustness, and real-time performance of the proposed system were evaluated on a public dataset, containing both single-person and multi-person sequences with up to 4 people interacting. The results obtained using different subsets of the proposed tools show how the complete Hi-ROS pipeline provides accurate and reliable estimates also in challenging scenarios, with a reduction of the RMSE of up to 27% with respect to a pure tracking approach. This work aims to push forward the development of unobtrusive human–robot interaction applications, multi-person automated posture analyses, rehabilitation performance assessments, and any possible application enabled by real-time accurate assessment of human motion via markerless motion capture.