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H2020Individual fellowship2016–2019

PATH · PAssive Tracking of people and things for physical beHavior analysis

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2016-06-01 → 2019-05-31
EU contribution
€244,269
Participants
2
Scheme
MSCA-IF

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Results in brief

PAssive Tracking of people and things for physical beHavior analysis

There is huge interest in tracking the movement of people and understanding crowd behavior in public spaces, such as the one shown in Fig. 1. Such spaces are often monitored by dedicated hardware or by relying on personal devices. However, there are significant privacy and security issues associated to active monitoring. Fig. 2 illustrates the trade-off of privacy preservation and cost saving for diverse active (e.g., cellular, wireless sensor networks) and passive (e.g., RFID, sensor radar networks) systems. The main goal of PATH is to define a new paradigm for the behavior analysis of people and things, by tracking their positions and dynamics with minimal implementation cost and maximal privacy preservation. Without relying on any targets’ device, PATH enables the detection, localization, and tracking of targets that do not participate in the localization process with minimum intrusion and avoiding the identification of individuals. This is useful for crowd-based decision making to enable the appropriate allocation of resources at critical times. The objectives of PATH are: (i) to develop a framework for system design and analysis, as well as to derive fundamental limits; (ii) to devise advanced techniques for detection and tracking based on reflections from the targets and exploitation of signals of opportunity; (iii) to recognize new patterns related to targets dynamics based on low-complexity signal feature extraction; (v) to establish a proof-of-concept for an industrial-driven use case. PATH's theoretical findings provide performance benchmarks and guidelines for system design as well as for developing efficient algorithms. The algorithms and techniques developed in PATH outperform current SoA techniques and maintain low complexity thanks to a new crowd-centric approach. In short, PATH's results open the way to a new class of passive wireless systems as excellent candidates for physical behavior analysis.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

The main goal of passive tracking of people and things (PATH) is to define a new paradigm for physical behavior inference, where the dynamics of physical entities are tracked with minimal implementation cost, maximal privacy preservation, and intrinsically protected secrecy. PATH relies on the detection, tracking, and behavior analysis of targets without active devices, by integrating such capabilities in infrastructures for the Internet of things (IOT) that are already present in a monitored environment. This enables several applications including visitor counting and flow monitoring. The objectives of PATH are: (i) to develop a framework for system design and analysis, as well as to derive fundamental limits; (ii) to devise advanced techniques for detection and exploitation of networks of opportunity; (iii) to develop inference techniques based on wireless networks properties for intrinsically secure tracking; (iv) to recognize new patterns related to targets dynamics based on signal feature extraction; (v) to establish a proof-of-concept for an industrial-driven use case.PATH will enhance the potential of the experienced researcher (ER) by relying on: (i) the solid experience of the successful Ph.D. completed by the young ER, which included a year as a visiting student in the USA; (ii) a challenging, interdisciplinary, and multi-sectorial work program; (iii) a genuine mobility program with an outgoing phase at a top tier university, supervised by a world-renowned expert in the field, and with an incoming phase at a high ranked and growing research group; (iv) a secondment program at a leading industry in the field, which confirms the industrial interest and that is tailored to the ER, with an evident commitment in terms of supervision and infrastructures; (v) a rich, five-fold training program, not limited to training through research; (vi) an implementation plan agreed with an advisory board for an efficient achievement of the ambitious objectives.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI FERRARA · FerraraCoordinatorItaly
  • MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · CambridgeUnited States

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union