Beyond Social Distancing: Application of real-world coordinates in a multi-camera system with privacy protection

In this paper, we develop a privacy-preserving framework to detect and track pedestrians and project to their real-world coordinates facilitating social distancing detection. The transform is calculated using social distancing markers or floor tiles visible in the camera view, without an extensive calibration process. We select a lightweight detection model to process CCTV videos and perform tracking within-camera. The features collected during within-camera tracking are then used to associate passenger trajectories across multiple cameras. We demonstrate and analyze results qualitatively for both social distancing detection and multi-camera tracking on real-world data captured in a busy airport in Dublin, Ireland.