Patent ID: 9373169
Filing Date: 2016-06-21
CPC Classification: G06T

Claim Text:
1. A system for determining a position characteristic for an object in a detection area of a space, the system comprising: an optically identifiable element having a width at least 10 times more than a height thereof, said optically identifiable element being positioned on a vertical surface proximal to a ground surface in the detection area by a largest distance from the ground surface of no more than 50 cm, the optically identifiable element having an optical property; a camera positioned across the detection area from the optically identifiable element, the camera capturing an image that comprises (i) the detection area and (ii) the optically identifiable element, wherein the image further comprises an image plane of pixels (u,v) extending in a horizontal direction and in a vertical direction, where u is a vertical axis and v is a horizontal axis; a detector for detecting the optically identifiable element in the image in response to the optical property; an occlusion processor for determining an occlusion property of at least one occlusion of the optically identifiable element in the image in response to the optical property, wherein the occlusion property includes at least one of an image position and an image size of an occluded segment of the optically identifiable element; and a position processor (i) for determining an image characteristic of an image object in the image associated with the occluded segment of the optically identifiable element, wherein the image characteristic is indicative of an extension of the image object in an image direction away from the optically identifiable element, (ii) for determining a segment border in the image between (ii)(a) an image region where the image object is mapped and (ii)(b) an image region where the image object touches a floor of the space in the image and (iii) for determining a depth position for the object in the detection area in response to (iii)(a) the occlusion property, further in response to (iii)(b) the image characteristic of the image object, and still further in response to (iii)(c) a u-coordinate for the image object that represents a vertical image distance between a line corresponding to the optically identifiable element and the segment border such that only a portion of an image object segment extending below the line is considered, and wherein the depth position is indicative of a position of the object along an optical axis of the camera.