Real-time pedestrian pose estimation, tracking and localization for social distancing

The corona virus pandemic has introduced limitations which were previously not a cause for concern. Chief among them are wearing face masks in public and constraints on the physical distance between people as an effective measure to reduce the virus spread. Visual surveillance systems, which are common in urban environments and initially commissioned for security surveillance, can be re-purposed to help limit the spread of COVID-19 and prevent future pandemics. In this work, we propose a novel integration technique for real-time pose estimation and multiple human tracking in a pedestrian setting, primarily for social distancing, using CCTV camera footage. Our technique promises a sizeable increase in processing speed and improved detection in very low-resolution scenarios. Using existing surveillance systems, pedestrian pose estimation, tracking and localization for social distancing (PETL4SD) is proposed for measuring social distancing, which combines the output of multiple neural networks aided with fundamental 2D/3D vision techniques. We leverage state-of-the-art object and pose estimation algorithms, combining their strengths, for increase in speed and improvement in detections. These detections are then tracked using a bespoke version of the FASTMOT algorithm. Temporal and analogous estimation techniques are used to deal with occlusions when estimating posture. Projective geometry along with the aforementioned posture tracking is then used to localize the pedestrians. Inter-personal distances are calculated and locally inspected to detect possible violations of the social distancing rules. Furthermore, a "smart violations detector" is employed which estimates if people are together based on their current actions and eliminates false social distancing violations within groups. Finally, distances are intuitively visualized with the right perspective. All implementation is in real time and is performed on Python. Experimental results are provided to validate our proposed method quantitatively and qualitatively on public domain datasets using only a single CCTV camera feed as input. Our results show our technique to outperform the baseline in speed and accuracy in low-resolution scenarios. The code of this work will be made publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/bilalze/PETL4SD.