Top-down, bottom-up multivalued default reasoning for identity maintenance

Persistent tracking systems require the capacity to track individuals by maintaining identity across visibility gaps caused by occlusion events. In traditional computer vision systems, the flow of information is typically bottom-up. The low level image processing modules take video input, perform early vision tasks such as background subtraction and object detection,and pass this information to the high level reasoning module. This paper describes the architecture of a system that uses top-down information flow to perform identity maintenance across occlusion events. This system uses the high level reasoning module to provide control feedback to the low level image processing module to perform forensic analysis of archival video and actively acquire information required to arrive at identity decisions. This functionality is in addition to traditional bottom-up reasoning about identity, employing contextual cues and appearance matching, within the multivalued default logic framework proposed in [18]. This framework, in addition to bestowing upon the system the property of nonmonotonicity, also allows for it to qualitatively encode its confidence in the identity decisions it takes.