Image Analysis for Video Surveillance Based on Spatial Regularization of a Statistical Model-Based Change Detection
✍ Scribed by Francesco Ziliani; Andrea Cavallaro
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 608 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1077-2014
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✦ Synopsis
A dvanced video surveillance applications require two successive phases: image analysis and content understanding. The first phase analyzes and extracts the characteristics of the video sequence. It defines the regions or the objects of interest according to their spatial/ temporal properties. This image analysis results in a segmentation of the video sequence. This is interpreted by the content understanding phase according to the specific scenario and surveillance requirements. This paper addresses the image analysis problem for a video surveillance system. We apply a statistical model-based change detection technique that defines the areas of interest in the image. This method provides a reliable detection of the moving areas in the scene. It does not require fine tuning of any threshold along the sequence and it is computationally efficient. However, it is not able to provide an accurate spatial descriptions of the objects. In particular it fails in distinguishing shadows and reflections from real moving objects. In order to improve the spatial coherence of the change detection results, each area detected as changed is analyzed separately. Its spatial and temporal descriptors are integrated in a multi-feature clustering algorithm. This is able to distinguish the regions belonging to real objects from the regions representing their shadows and/or reflections. A successive refinement labels as background all those regions that are sufficiently similar to the background. The selective procedure we propose minimizes the computational load since only the changed areas in the image are processed. We test this method on both indoor and outdoor surveillance sequences. All the results show a correct segmentation of the scene. Moreover, each object defined in the segmentation is described in terms of its spatial and temporal properties. These results represent a valid input for a later content understanding procedure in several surveillance scenarios.