Autonomous real-time surveillance system with distributed IP cameras

An autonomous Internet Protocol (IP) camera based object tracking and behaviour identification system, capable of running in real-time on an embedded system with limited memory and processing power is presented in this paper. The main contribution of this work is the integration of processor intensive image processing algorithms on an embedded platform capable of running at real-time for monitoring the behaviour of pedestrians. The Algorithm Based Object Recognition and Tracking (ABORAT) system architecture presented here was developed on an Intel PXA270-based development board clocked at 520 MHz. The platform was connected to a commercial stationary IP-based camera in a remote monitoring station for intelligent image processing. The system is capable of detecting moving objects and their shadows in a complex environment with varying lighting intensity and moving foliage. Objects moving close to each other are also detected to extract their trajectories which are then fed into an unsupervised neural network for autonomous classification. The novel intelligent video system presented is also capable of performing simple analytic functions such as tracking and generating alerts when objects enter/leave regions or cross tripwires superimposed on live video by the operator

A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain

Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was 0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI

MOVING OBJECT DETECTION USING BIT PLANE SLICING

This thesis presents moving object detection algorithm using bit plane extraction of successive frames and comparing the respective bit planes by XOR operation. The proposed methodworks on 8-bit grayscale video frames obtained from a static camera. This algorithm is able to detect the motion of single and multiple objects in outside and inside environments. Algorithm has been implemented in MATLAB by using several videos from VISOR database and was compared to existing conventional methods to show its effectiveness. Performance of an algorithm was evaluated based on ground truth metrics and results in terms of sensitivity, specificity, positive prediction and accuracy proved the validity of it. Results show that the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of mentioned metrics in comparison to other algorithms.

FCN-rLSTM: Deep Spatio-Temporal Neural Networks for Vehicle Counting in City Cameras

In this paper, we develop deep spatio-temporal neural networks to sequentially count vehicles from low quality videos captured by city cameras (citycams). Citycam videos have low resolution, low frame rate, high occlusion and large perspective, making most existing methods lose their efficacy. To overcome limitations of existing methods and incorporate the temporal information of traffic video, we design a novel FCN-rLSTM network to jointly estimate vehicle density and vehicle count by connecting fully convolutional neural networks (FCN) with long short term memory networks (LSTM) in a residual learning fashion. Such design leverages the strengths of FCN for pixel-level prediction and the strengths of LSTM for learning complex temporal dynamics. The residual learning connection reformulates the vehicle count regression as learning residual functions with reference to the sum of densities in each frame, which significantly accelerates the training of networks. To preserve feature map resolution, we propose a Hyper-Atrous combination to integrate atrous convolution in FCN and combine feature maps of different convolution layers. FCN-rLSTM enables refined feature representation and a novel end-to-end trainable mapping from pixels to vehicle count. We extensively evaluated the proposed method on different counting tasks with three datasets, with experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness and robustness. In particular, FCN-rLSTM reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) from 5.31 to 4.21 on TRANCOS, and reduces the MAE from 2.74 to 1.53 on WebCamT. Training process is accelerated by 5 times on average.Comment: Accepted by International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 201

Occlusion handling in multiple people tracking

Object tracking with occlusion handling is a challenging problem in automated video surveillance. Occlusion handling and tracking have always been considered as separate modules. We have proposed an automated video surveillance system, which automatically detects occlusions and perform occlusion handling, while the tracker continues to track resulting separated objects. A new approach based on sub-blobbing is presented for tracking objects accurately and steadily, when the target encounters occlusion in video sequences. We have used a feature-based framework for tracking, which involves feature extraction and feature matching

Adaptive foreground segmentation using fuzzy approach

Intelligent visual surveillance which attempts to detect, recognize and track certain objects from image sequences is becoming an active research topic in computer vision community. Background modeling and foreground segmentation are the first two and the most important steps in any intelligent visual surveillance systems. The accuracy of these two steps highly effects performance of the following steps. In this thesis, we propose a simple and novel method which employs histogram based median method for background modeling and a fuzzy k-Means clustering approach for foreground segmentation. Experiments on a set of videos and benchmark image sequences show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with other two contemporary methods - k -Means clustering and Mixture of Gaussians (MoG) - the proposed method is not only time efficient but also provides better segmentation results