--- /dev/null
+
+INTRODUCTION
+------------
+
+ The Probabilistic Occupancy Map is a procedure which estimates the
+ marginal probabilities of presence of individuals at every location
+ in an area of interest under a simple appearance model, given binary
+ images corresponding to the result of a background-subtraction from
+ different viewpoints.
+
+ The appearance model is parametrized by a family of rectangles which
+ approximate the silhouettes of individuals standing at every
+ location of interest, from every point of view.
+
+INSTALLATION AND TEST
+---------------------
+
+ This program should compile by typing `make' on any standard
+ GNU/Linux system, as long as the libpng is installed with its header
+ files.
+
+ To run a simple test on the images provided in the archive just type
+
+ ./pom test.pom
+
+ It will generate several result files in the /tmp directory.
+
+ If the program is not provided with a filename, it will process the
+ standard input, but will not make any output.
+
+CONFIGURATION FILE
+------------------
+
+ The configuration file contains the following keywords
+
+ ROOM <view width> <view height> <number of cameras> <number of locations>
+
+ Defines the input image size, the number of cameras and the number
+ of locations in the area of interest.
+
+ RECTANGLE <camera number> <location number> notvisible|<xmin> <ymin> <xmax> <ymax>
+
+ Defines the parameters of a certain rectangle, standing for an
+ individual at a certain location viewed from a certain camera. All
+ non-specified rectangles are "not visible" by default.
+
+ INPUT_VIEW_FORMAT <input image filename format>
+
+ Specifies the filenames of the input images produced by the
+ background subtraction. The immobile parts should be black (0, 0,
+ 0) and the moving ones white (255, 255, 255). See FILENAME FORMAT
+ below.
+
+ RESULT_VIEW_FORMAT <result image filename format>
+
+ Specifies the filenames of the result images. See FILENAME FORMAT
+ below.
+
+ RESULT_FORMAT <result filename format>
+
+ Specifies the filenames of the result probability files, which
+ contains one marginal probability per line, hence as many lines as
+ there are locations of interest. See FILENAME FORMAT below.
+
+ CONVERGENCE_VIEW_FORMAT <convergence file name format>
+
+ Specifies the filenames of the images for individual iteration
+ during the convergence of the algorithm. Use with care, since tens
+ of images will be produced for every single frame. See FILENAME
+ FORMAT below.
+
+ PRIOR
+
+ Sets the prior probability of presence (common to all
+ locations). Default is 0.01.
+
+ SIGMA_IMAGE_DENSITY
+
+ Sets the variance of the distance between the image produced by
+ the background subtraction and the ideal synthetic image. Default
+ is 0.01.
+
+ MAX_NB_SOLVER_ITERATIONS
+
+ Sets a bound on the number of iterations. Default is 100.
+
+ PROBA_IGNORED
+
+ Sets the probability of absence ignored by the solver to speed up
+ the convergence (use with care, it can produce false
+ positive). Default is 1.0
+
+ The file test.pom provided in the archive gives an example. Lines
+ starting with "#" are ignored.
+
+FILENAME FORMAT
+---------------
+
+ Every filename format in the configuration file is a string with the
+ following three "conversion specifications":
+
+ %c camera number
+
+ %f frame number
+
+ %i iteration number
+
+ Some of these fields may be meaningless, depending with the
+ context. For instance the iteration number is defined only for
+ CONVERGENCE_VIEW_FORMAT.
+
+REFERENCES
+----------
+
+ For more information about the POM algorithm, please check the
+ section V and appendix A of:
+
+ François Fleuret, Jérôme Berclaz, Richard Lengagne and Pascal Fua,
+ "Multi-Camera People Tracking with a Probabilistic Occupancy Map",
+ IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
+ (TPAMI), 2007, to be published.
+
+ This distributed version of the software is slightly slower than the
+ one described in the article, for which many values such as the
+ image size were hard-coded in the source to let the compiler
+ optimize the code.
+
+LICENSE
+-------
+
+ This source code is available under the terms of the version 3 of
+ the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
+ Foundation. In short: If you distribute a software that uses POM,
+ you have to distribute it under GPL version 3, hence with the source
+ code. Another option is to contact us to purchase a commercial
+ license.
+
+CONTACT
+-------
+
+ Please mail pom@epfl.ch for bug reports, comments and questions.