Monitor proximity and trigger distance-based alerts

Use This When

• Enforcing safety zones in industrial settings where workers must stay clear of machinery
• Implementing social distancing monitoring or crowd density alerts
• Building collision warning systems for vehicles, robots, or moving objects
• Detecting when specific object pairs violate minimum or maximum spacing rules

What It Does

• Computes pairwise distances between tracked objects using their positions
• Compares distances against configurable thresholds to detect violations
• Flags proximity events for alerting, logging, or visualization
• Can filter by object class pairs to monitor only relevant interactions

Works Best With

• Object trackers or Kalman smoothing → this component → alert systems, visualizers, or MQTT publishers
• Calibrated pipelines where pixel-to-metric conversion provides real-world distances
• Safety monitoring dashboards needing real-time proximity status

Caveats

• Distances in pixel coordinates require camera calibration for meaningful thresholds
• 2D image distances ignore depth; objects at different distances may appear close
• Threshold tuning needed per scene; wide-angle lenses distort apparent spacing