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+
+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.