AI-Powered Multi-Camera Tracking

Track and identify objects anonymously across cameras for smart city, warehouse, factory, and retail operations use cases.

Workloads

Computer Vision / Video Analytics

Industries

Smart Cities / Spaces
Retail/Consumer packaged goods
Manufacturing
Healthcare and Life Science

Business Goal

Return on Investment
Risk Mitigation

Products

NVIDIA DeepStream
NVIDIA Metropolis
NVIDIA Omniverse
NVIDIA AI Enterprise

Overview

What Is Multi-Camera Tracking?

Imagine a world where factories run automatically with safety and efficiency, retail spaces are optimized for the shopper experience, and public spaces like hospitals, airports, and campuses are safer and more streamlined. These spaces are too large for a single camera to cover, so they’re typically monitored by hundreds of overlapping cameras. Following objects and measuring activity accurately across cameras and space is called multi-camera tracking, letting you more effectively monitor and manage your spaces.

How Can You Use Multi-Camera Tracking?

Manufacturing and warehouse automation: Improve your shop floor operations by optimizing routes for autonomous robots, equipment, and workers. AI-powered analytics help identify congestion, bottlenecks, and risks, allowing for data-driven decisions that enhance productivity and worker safety. 

Retail store layout optimization: By analyzing customer navigation throughout your store, you can reconfigure aisles and product placement to maximize sales and revenue. Multi-camera tracking helps identify bottlenecks, track customer behavior, and simulate layout scenarios to predict impact on sales and customer experiences. .

In-hospital patient care: Access continuous monitoring of patients in hospitals for an added layer of safety and security. The solution enables real-time alerts and notifications, ensuring prompt attention and care when it’s needed.

What Is Multi-Camera Tracking?

Imagine a world where factories run automatically with safety and efficiency, retail spaces are optimized for the shopper experience, and public spaces like hospitals, airports, and campuses are safer and more streamlined. These spaces are too large for a single camera to cover, so they’re typically monitored by hundreds of overlapping cameras. Following objects and measuring activity accurately across cameras and space is called multi-camera tracking, letting you more effectively monitor and manage your spaces.

AI-Powered Multi-Camera Application Development

NVIDIA's customizable multi-camera tracking workflow gives you a starting point to get your development in gear without having to start from scratch and eliminates months of development time. The workflow also provides a validated path to production.

The solution includes state-of-the-art AI models pretrained on real and synthetic datasets that you can customize for your use case. It covers the entire lifecycle—from simulation to analytics—and integrates NVIDIA's cutting-edge tools, including Isaac SIM™, Omniverse™, TAO, and DeepStream. This workflow is packed with real-time video streaming modules and is built on a scalable, cloud-native microservices architecture. No extra cost, just infrastructure and tool licenses. Plus, you get expert support and the latest product updates with NVIDIA AI Enterprise to accelerate your vision AI project.

How Can You Use Multi-Camera Tracking?

Manufacturing and warehouse automation: Improve your shop floor operations by optimizing routes for autonomous robots, equipment, and workers. AI-powered analytics help identify congestion, bottlenecks, and risks, allowing for data-driven decisions that enhance productivity and worker safety. 

Retail store layout optimization:  By analyzing customer navigation throughout your store, you can reconfigure aisles and product placement to maximize sales and revenue. Multi-camera tracking helps identify bottlenecks, track customer behavior, and simulate layout scenarios to predict impact on sales and customer experiences.

In-hospital patient care: Access continuous monitoring of patients in hospitals for an added layer of safety and security. The solution enables real-time alerts and notifications, ensuring prompt attention and care when it’s needed.

Technical Implementation

Launch Multi-Camera Tracking in Less Than Five Minutes With DeepStream

Historically, multi-camera tracking has been difficult because it involves matching objects across different camera views, requiring precise camera calibration and synchronization. Challenges include varying camera angles, lighting, and video quality. Handling non-overlapping views and fusing information for accurate and consistent IDs across cameras adds even more complexity.

The NVIDIA DeepStream SDK multi-camera tracking (MCT) plug-in provides consistent 3D object tracking across multiple overlapping, calibrated cameras. And setup can be completed in less than five minutes, including global IDs, real-time fusion, and scalable deployment for retail, warehouses, and beyond.

End-to-End Workflow for Multi-Camera Tracking

In this demo, a digital twin of a warehouse–built using NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries–operates as a simulation environment for dozens of digital workers and multiple autonomous robots. Integrated into the NVIDIA Mega virtual factory workflow, the multi-camera tracking workflow enabled the creation of a centralized map of the entire warehouse with 100 simulated cameras, providing real-time awareness of the physical space.

NVIDIA provides the software tools for the entire development pipeline—from data generation to model training to application development—to help developers build complex vision AI applications for large spaces, fast.

  • NVIDIA Omniverse libraries for creating 3D digital twins of real-world environments.
    Use NVIDIA Omniverse—a collection of libraries and microservices—to construct 3D digital twins of real-world spaces, position virtual cameras to capture diverse synthetic data, generate ground-truth annotations for training perception models, and validate end-to-end applications prior to real-world deployment.
  • NVIDIA Isaac Sim™ for synthetic data generation to optimize training..
  • The Action and Event Generation application kit within Isaac Sim simplifies agent simulation—including people and autonomous moving robots—to streamline the generation of synthetic data from scenes.
  • NVIDIA TAO toolkit for streamlined model development with real and synthetic data.
  • NVIDIA TAO simplifies model training and optimization for tasks such as people detection and re-identification. Developers can fine-tune pretrained models with synthetic and real data and optimize for better inference performance through quantization and pruning.
  • DeepStream for Multi-Camera Tracking (MCT) across a range of cameras.
  • MCT extends DeepStream NvTracker to enable distributed, real-time 3D tracking across a network of cameras. DeepStream automatically assigns unique IDs for new objects, preserving identity through occlusions and handovers. MCT works seamlessly with both 2D and 3D detectors, supporting a wide range of use cases.
  • Cloud-native design for scalable deployment from edge to cloud.
  • Containerize your applications easily with Docker, Kubernetes, and GPU Operators to deploy cloud-native solutions on NVIDIA Jetson™, x86, and dGPU.
     

Jumpstart development of multi-camera vision AI applications with the NVIDIA accelerated end-to-end workflow—from Omniverse libraries for synthetic data generation to TAO for streamlined model development to Metropolis for modular, cloud-native application building blocks.

Accelerate the development of your multi-camera tracking AI application.