Target recognitions in multiple camera CCTV using colour constancy

People tracking using colour feature in crowded scene through CCTV network have been a popular and at the same time a very difficult topic in computer vision. It is mainly because of the difficulty for the acquisition of intrinsic signatures of targets from a single view of the scene. Many factors, such as variable illumination conditions and viewing angles, will induce illusive modification of intrinsic signatures of targets. The objective of this paper is to verify if colour constancy (CC) approach really helps people tracking in CCTV network system. We have testified a number of CC algorithms together with various colour descriptors, to assess the efficiencies of people recognitions from real multi-camera i-LIDS data set via Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC). It is found that when CC is applied together with some form of colour restoration mechanisms such as colour transfer, the recognition performance can be improved by at least a factor of two. An elementary luminance based CC coupled with a pixel based colour transfer algorithm, together with experimental results are reported in the present paper