Raytheon BBN Technologies

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Real-time 360-degree LIDAR surveillance.

Numerous security and surveillance applications require the ability to track people in crowded environments for safety and security. Traditional camera surveillance systems not only require manual intervention, which can be costly and error-prone, but also are subject several shortcomings, including:

• Losing a person in a crowd due to partial occlusions
• Inaccurate hand-offs between multiple cameras due to misaligned perspectives and differences in color calibration
• Confusion in the tracking software due to lighting effects
• The need for a pre-deployed infrastructure of many cameras to monitor a large, populated space from multiple angles

The LIDAR Advantage

Our LIDAR tracking system overcomes these technical challenges. Using a single 360-degree Velodyne LIDAR sensor with 64 eye-safe vertically aligned beams instead of a network of cameras, we collect large, dense “point clouds” of spatial information, or about 1.3 million three-dimension points a second. All the data can be processed in real-time for immediate scene understanding and people tracking, overcoming the limitations of traditional camera systems. Using the LIDAR we are able to understand the scene, classify the objects, and track peoples actions. The performance gains include:

• Better handling of partial occlusions through easier 3D segmentation
• Easy target hand off from one sensor to another by using 3D point information instead of color/texture information
• Immunity from lighting effects
• No confusion based on texture or color variations
• One sensor covers a 31,000 square meter area