---
title: "Watch Your Six: people tracking for LED totems"
description: "Several cameras and a pose-detection model turn people walking around an LED installation into OSC events that drive visuals in Resolume."
date: 2026-04-22T11:05:33+02:00
lastmod: 2026-11-06T11:38:29+01:00
url: https://klimek.link/projects/watch-your-six/
author: "Marcin Klimek"
source: https://klimek.link/projects/watch-your-six/
---

# Watch Your Six: people tracking for LED totems

**Watch Your Six** detects people around an LED totem installation and turns what they're doing into events for the visuals.

I built it for an advertising client, for an interactive video installation shown at trade fairs.

Camera feeds (from USB cameras or video files) go through a YOLO11 pose model, people are tracked from frame to frame, and the program estimates the distance of every person from the camera. Raw detections are noisy, so a per-person state machine with hysteresis has to turn them into stable events:

- enter and exit, when someone crosses a calibrated boundary line, with a separate dead-zone line on the way out so that people standing on the line don't flicker in and out;
- proximity of the closest person;
- arms raised, read from the pose keypoints, with a cooldown per camera;
- counts per camera and in total.

Those events go out as OSC messages to Resolume, which drives the LED visuals.

*Diagram: Watch Your Six: from camera feeds to OSC events that drive LED visuals*

There's a FastAPI web interface with the live camera streams and an event log, and that's also where you add and calibrate cameras, by dragging the boundary and dead-zone lines right on the preview. The interface has a phone layout and finds the server on the network with mDNS. The 93 tests run on synthetic data, without any cameras, and production runs on Windows with CUDA.

Source: https://klimek.link/projects/watch-your-six/