770 research outputs found
Comparative analysis of motion detection methods or video surveillance systems
In this paper, a motion detection module
is proposed for real time dynamic video frames by
comparing the three major classes of methods for
motion detection namely Background Subtraction,
Temporal differencing and Optical Flow method .A
hierarchical background model is proposed based on
segmenting the background images. The region model
is extracted from the histogram of a specific region
which is similar to the kind of a Gaussian mixture
model. The pixel model is described by histograms of
oriented gradients of pixels in each region based on the
co-occurrence of image variations. Silhouette
detection algorithm is proposed. The experimental
results are carried out with a video database to
demonstrate the effectiveness, which is applied to both
static and dynamic scenes by comparing it with some
well-known motion detection methods namely
Temporal differencing and Optical Flow method and
based on the results a motion detection module for
dynamic video frames can be developed which is cost
effective, shows high rate of accuracy, low rate of
complexity, and well adapt to different kinds of shadow
distributio
Online Mutual Foreground Segmentation for Multispectral Stereo Videos
The segmentation of video sequences into foreground and background regions is
a low-level process commonly used in video content analysis and smart
surveillance applications. Using a multispectral camera setup can improve this
process by providing more diverse data to help identify objects despite adverse
imaging conditions. The registration of several data sources is however not
trivial if the appearance of objects produced by each sensor differs
substantially. This problem is further complicated when parallax effects cannot
be ignored when using close-range stereo pairs. In this work, we present a new
method to simultaneously tackle multispectral segmentation and stereo
registration. Using an iterative procedure, we estimate the labeling result for
one problem using the provisional result of the other. Our approach is based on
the alternating minimization of two energy functions that are linked through
the use of dynamic priors. We rely on the integration of shape and appearance
cues to find proper multispectral correspondences, and to properly segment
objects in low contrast regions. We also formulate our model as a frame
processing pipeline using higher order terms to improve the temporal coherence
of our results. Our method is evaluated under different configurations on
multiple multispectral datasets, and our implementation is available online.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication in IJCV (December 2018
Video foreground extraction for mobile camera platforms
Foreground object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision with many applications in areas such as object tracking, event identification, and behavior analysis. Most conventional foreground object detection methods work only in a stable illumination environments using fixed cameras. In real-world applications, however, it is often the case that the algorithm needs to operate under the following challenging conditions: drastic lighting changes, object shape complexity, moving cameras, low frame capture rates, and low resolution images. This thesis presents four novel approaches for foreground object detection on real-world datasets using cameras deployed on moving vehicles.The first problem addresses passenger detection and tracking tasks for public transport buses investigating the problem of changing illumination conditions and low frame capture rates. Our approach integrates a stable SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) background seat modelling method with a human shape model into a weighted Bayesian framework to detect passengers. To deal with the problem of tracking multiple targets, we employ the Reversible Jump Monte Carlo Markov Chain tracking algorithm. Using the SVM classifier, the appearance transformation models capture changes in the appearance of the foreground objects across two consecutives frames under low frame rate conditions. In the second problem, we present a system for pedestrian detection involving scenes captured by a mobile bus surveillance system. It integrates scene localization, foreground-background separation, and pedestrian detection modules into a unified detection framework. The scene localization module performs a two stage clustering of the video data.In the first stage, SIFT Homography is applied to cluster frames in terms of their structural similarity, and the second stage further clusters these aligned frames according to consistency in illumination. This produces clusters of images that are differential in viewpoint and lighting. A kernel density estimation (KDE) technique for colour and gradient is then used to construct background models for each image cluster, which is further used to detect candidate foreground pixels. Finally, using a hierarchical template matching approach, pedestrians can be detected.In addition to the second problem, we present three direct pedestrian detection methods that extend the HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) techniques (Dalal and Triggs, 2005) and provide a comparative evaluation of these approaches. The three approaches include: a) a new histogram feature, that is formed by the weighted sum of both the gradient magnitude and the filter responses from a set of elongated Gaussian filters (Leung and Malik, 2001) corresponding to the quantised orientation, which we refer to as the Histogram of Oriented Gradient Banks (HOGB) approach; b) the codebook based HOG feature with branch-and-bound (efficient subwindow search) algorithm (Lampert et al., 2008) and; c) the codebook based HOGB approach.In the third problem, a unified framework that combines 3D and 2D background modelling is proposed to detect scene changes using a camera mounted on a moving vehicle. The 3D scene is first reconstructed from a set of videos taken at different times. The 3D background modelling identifies inconsistent scene structures as foreground objects. For the 2D approach, foreground objects are detected using the spatio-temporal MRF algorithm. Finally, the 3D and 2D results are combined using morphological operations.The significance of these research is that it provides basic frameworks for automatic large-scale mobile surveillance applications and facilitates many higher-level applications such as object tracking and behaviour analysis
Automatic object classification for surveillance videos.
PhDThe recent popularity of surveillance video systems, specially located in urban
scenarios, demands the development of visual techniques for monitoring purposes.
A primary step towards intelligent surveillance video systems consists on automatic
object classification, which still remains an open research problem and the keystone
for the development of more specific applications.
Typically, object representation is based on the inherent visual features. However,
psychological studies have demonstrated that human beings can routinely categorise
objects according to their behaviour. The existing gap in the understanding
between the features automatically extracted by a computer, such as appearance-based
features, and the concepts unconsciously perceived by human beings but
unattainable for machines, or the behaviour features, is most commonly known
as semantic gap. Consequently, this thesis proposes to narrow the semantic gap
and bring together machine and human understanding towards object classification.
Thus, a Surveillance Media Management is proposed to automatically detect and
classify objects by analysing the physical properties inherent in their appearance
(machine understanding) and the behaviour patterns which require a higher level of
understanding (human understanding). Finally, a probabilistic multimodal fusion
algorithm bridges the gap performing an automatic classification considering both
machine and human understanding.
The performance of the proposed Surveillance Media Management framework
has been thoroughly evaluated on outdoor surveillance datasets. The experiments
conducted demonstrated that the combination of machine and human understanding
substantially enhanced the object classification performance. Finally, the inclusion
of human reasoning and understanding provides the essential information to bridge
the semantic gap towards smart surveillance video systems
Human object annotation for surveillance video forensics
A system that can automatically annotate surveillance video in a manner useful for locating a person with a given description of clothing is presented. Each human is annotated based on two appearance features: primary colors of clothes and the presence of text/logos on clothes. The annotation occurs after a robust foreground extraction stage employing a modified Gaussian mixture model-based approach. The proposed pipeline consists of a preprocessing stage where color appearance of an image is improved using a color constancy algorithm. In order to annotate color information for human clothes, we use the color histogram feature in HSV space and find local maxima to extract dominant colors for different parts of a segmented human object. To detect text/logos on clothes, we begin with the extraction of connected components of enhanced horizontal, vertical, and diagonal edges in the frames. These candidate regions are classified as text or nontext on the basis of their local energy-based shape histogram features. Further, to detect humans, a novel technique has been proposed that uses contourlet transform-based local binary pattern (CLBP) features. In the proposed method, we extract the uniform direction invariant LBP feature descriptor for contourlet transformed high-pass subimages from vertical and diagonal directional bands. In the final stage, extracted CLBP descriptors are classified by a trained support vector machine. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of our method on large-scale surveillance video data
Spatiotemporal visual analysis of human actions
In this dissertation we propose four methods for the recognition of human activities. In all four of
them, the representation of the activities is based on spatiotemporal features that are automatically
detected at areas where there is a significant amount of independent motion, that is, motion that is
due to ongoing activities in the scene. We propose the use of spatiotemporal salient points as features
throughout this dissertation. The algorithms presented, however, can be used with any kind of features,
as long as the latter are well localized and have a well-defined area of support in space and time. We
introduce the utilized spatiotemporal salient points in the first method presented in this dissertation.
By extending previous work on spatial saliency, we measure the variations in the information content of
pixel neighborhoods both in space and time, and detect the points at the locations and scales for which
this information content is locally maximized. In this way, an activity is represented as a collection of
spatiotemporal salient points. We propose an iterative linear space-time warping technique in order
to align the representations in space and time and propose to use Relevance Vector Machines (RVM)
in order to classify each example into an action category. In the second method proposed in this
dissertation we propose to enhance the acquired representations of the first method. More specifically,
we propose to track each detected point in time, and create representations based on sets of trajectories,
where each trajectory expresses how the information engulfed by each salient point evolves over time.
In order to deal with imperfect localization of the detected points, we augment the observation model
of the tracker with background information, acquired using a fully automatic background estimation
algorithm. In this way, the tracker favors solutions that contain a large number of foreground pixels.
In addition, we perform experiments where the tracked templates are localized on specific parts of the
body, like the hands and the head, and we further augment the tracker’s observation model using a
human skin color model. Finally, we use a variant of the Longest Common Subsequence algorithm
(LCSS) in order to acquire a similarity measure between the resulting trajectory representations, and
RVMs for classification. In the third method that we propose, we assume that neighboring salient
points follow a similar motion. This is in contrast to the previous method, where each salient point was
tracked independently of its neighbors. More specifically, we propose to extract a novel set of visual
descriptors that are based on geometrical properties of three-dimensional piece-wise polynomials. The
latter are fitted on the spatiotemporal locations of salient points that fall within local spatiotemporal
neighborhoods, and are assumed to follow a similar motion. The extracted descriptors are invariant in
translation and scaling in space-time. Coupling the neighborhood dimensions to the scale at which the
corresponding spatiotemporal salient points are detected ensures the latter. The descriptors that are
extracted across the whole dataset are subsequently clustered in order to create a codebook, which is
used in order to represent the overall motion of the subjects within small temporal windows.Finally,we use boosting in order to select the most discriminative of these windows for each class, and RVMs for
classification. The fourth and last method addresses the joint problem of localization and recognition
of human activities depicted in unsegmented image sequences. Its main contribution is the use of an
implicit representation of the spatiotemporal shape of the activity, which relies on the spatiotemporal
localization of characteristic ensembles of spatiotemporal features. The latter are localized around
automatically detected salient points. Evidence for the spatiotemporal localization of the activity
is accumulated in a probabilistic spatiotemporal voting scheme. During training, we use boosting in
order to create codebooks of characteristic feature ensembles for each class. Subsequently, we construct
class-specific spatiotemporal models, which encode where in space and time each codeword ensemble
appears in the training set. During testing, each activated codeword ensemble casts probabilistic
votes concerning the spatiotemporal localization of the activity, according to the information stored
during training. We use a Mean Shift Mode estimation algorithm in order to extract the most probable
hypotheses from each resulting voting space. Each hypothesis corresponds to a spatiotemporal volume
which potentially engulfs the activity, and is verified by performing action category classification with
an RVM classifier
Human shape modelling for carried object detection and segmentation
La détection des objets transportés est un des prérequis pour développer des systèmes qui cherchent à comprendre les activités impliquant des personnes et des objets. Cette thèse présente de nouvelles méthodes pour détecter et segmenter les objets transportés dans des vidéos de surveillance. Les contributions sont divisées en trois principaux chapitres. Dans le premier chapitre, nous introduisons notre détecteur d’objets transportés, qui nous permet de détecter un type générique d’objets. Nous formulons la détection d’objets transportés comme un problème de classification de contours. Nous classifions le contour des objets mobiles en deux classes : objets transportés et personnes. Un masque de probabilités est généré pour le contour d’une personne basé sur un ensemble d’exemplaires (ECE) de personnes qui marchent ou se tiennent debout de différents points de vue. Les contours qui ne correspondent pas au masque de probabilités généré sont considérés comme des candidats pour être des objets transportés. Ensuite, une région est assignée à chaque objet transporté en utilisant la Coupe Biaisée Normalisée (BNC) avec une probabilité obtenue par une fonction pondérée de son chevauchement avec l’hypothèse du masque de contours de la personne et du premier plan segmenté. Finalement, les objets transportés sont détectés en appliquant une Suppression des Non-Maxima (NMS) qui élimine les scores trop bas pour les objets candidats. Le deuxième chapitre de contribution présente une approche pour détecter des objets transportés avec une méthode innovatrice pour extraire des caractéristiques des régions d’avant-plan basée sur leurs contours locaux et l’information des super-pixels. Initiallement, un objet bougeant dans une séquence vidéo est segmente en super-pixels sous plusieurs échelles. Ensuite, les régions ressemblant à des personnes dans l’avant-plan sont identifiées en utilisant un ensemble de caractéristiques extraites de super-pixels dans un codebook de formes locales. Ici, les régions ressemblant à des humains sont équivalentes au masque de probabilités de la première méthode (ECE). Notre deuxième détecteur d’objets transportés bénéficie du nouveau descripteur de caractéristiques pour produire une carte de probabilité plus précise. Les compléments des super-pixels correspondants aux régions ressemblant à des personnes dans l’avant-plan sont considérés comme une carte de probabilité des objets transportés. Finalement, chaque groupe de super-pixels voisins avec une haute probabilité d’objets transportés et qui ont un fort support de bordure sont fusionnés pour former un objet transporté. Finalement, dans le troisième chapitre, nous présentons une méthode pour détecter et segmenter les objets transportés. La méthode proposée adopte le nouveau descripteur basé sur les super-pixels pour iii identifier les régions ressemblant à des objets transportés en utilisant la modélisation de la forme humaine. En utilisant l’information spatio-temporelle des régions candidates, la consistance des objets transportés récurrents, vus dans le temps, est obtenue et sert à détecter les objets transportés. Enfin, les régions d’objets transportés sont raffinées en intégrant de l’information sur leur apparence et leur position à travers le temps avec une extension spatio-temporelle de GrabCut. Cette étape finale sert à segmenter avec précision les objets transportés dans les séquences vidéo. Nos méthodes sont complètement automatiques, et font des suppositions minimales sur les personnes, les objets transportés, et les les séquences vidéo. Nous évaluons les méthodes décrites en utilisant deux ensembles de données, PETS 2006 et i-Lids AVSS. Nous évaluons notre détecteur et nos méthodes de segmentation en les comparant avec l’état de l’art. L’évaluation expérimentale sur les deux ensembles de données démontre que notre détecteur d’objets transportés et nos méthodes de segmentation surpassent de façon significative les algorithmes compétiteurs.Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems that reason about activities involving people and objects. This thesis presents novel methods to detect and segment carried objects in surveillance videos. The contributions are divided into three main chapters. In the first, we introduce our carried object detector which allows to detect a generic class of objects. We formulate carried object detection in terms of a contour classification problem. We classify moving object contours into two classes: carried object and person. A probability mask for person’s contours is generated based on an ensemble of contour exemplars (ECE) of walking/standing humans in different viewing directions. Contours that are not falling in the generated hypothesis mask are considered as candidates for carried object contours. Then, a region is assigned to each carried object candidate contour using Biased Normalized Cut (BNC) with a probability obtained by a weighted function of its overlap with the person’s contour hypothesis mask and segmented foreground. Finally, carried objects are detected by applying a Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) method which eliminates the low score carried object candidates. The second contribution presents an approach to detect carried objects with an innovative method for extracting features from foreground regions based on their local contours and superpixel information. Initially, a moving object in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then human-like regions in the foreground area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against a codebook of local shapes. Here the definition of human like regions is equivalent to a person’s probability map in our first proposed method (ECE). Our second carried object detector benefits from the novel feature descriptor to produce a more accurate probability map. Complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions in the foreground are considered as a carried object probability map. At the end, each group of neighboring superpixels with a high carried object probability which has strong edge support is merged to form a carried object. Finally, in the third contribution we present a method to detect and segment carried objects. The proposed method adopts the new superpixel-based descriptor to identify carried object-like candidate regions using human shape modeling. Using spatio-temporal information of the candidate regions, consistency of recurring carried object candidates viewed over time is obtained and serves to detect carried objects. Last, the detected carried object regions are refined by integrating information of their appearances and their locations over time with a spatio-temporal extension of GrabCut. This final stage is used to accurately segment carried objects in frames. Our methods are fully automatic, and make minimal assumptions about a person, carried objects and videos. We evaluate the aforementioned methods using two available datasets PETS 2006 and i-Lids AVSS. We compare our detector and segmentation methods against a state-of-the-art detector. Experimental evaluation on the two datasets demonstrates that both our carried object detection and segmentation methods significantly outperform competing algorithms
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