2 research outputs found
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Algorithms for multi-modal human movement and behaviour monitoring
This thesis describes investigations into improvements in the field of automated people tracking using multi-modal infrared (IR) and visible image information. The research question posed is; “To what extent can infrared image information be used to improve visible light based human tracking systems?” Automated passive tracking of human subjects is an active research area which has been approached in many ways. Typical approaches include the segmentation of the foreground, the location of humans, model initialisation and subject tracking. Sensor reliability evaluation and fusion methods are also key research areas in multi-modal systems. Shifting illumination and shadows can cause issues with visible images when attempting to extract foreground regions. Images from thermal IR cameras, which use long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) sensors, demonstrate high invariance to illumination. It is shown that thermal IR images often provide superior foreground masks using pixel level statistical extraction techniques in many scenarios. Experiments are performed to determine if cues are present at the data level that may indicate the quality of the sensor as an input. Modality specific measures are proposed as possible indicators of sensor quality (determined by foreground extraction capability). A sensor and application specific method for scene evaluation is proposed, whereby sensor quality is measured at the pixel level. A neuro-fuzzy inference system is trained using the scene quality measures to assess a series of scenes and make a modality decision
Algorithms and evaluation for object detection and tracking in computer vision
Vision-based object detection and tracking, especially for video surveillance applications, is studied from algorithms to performance evaluation. This dissertation is composed of four topics: (1) Background Modeling and Detection, (2) Performance Evaluation of Sensitive Target Detection, (3) Multi-view Multi-target Multi-Hypothesis Segmentation and Tracking of People, and (4) A Fine-Structure Image/Video Quality Measure.
First, we present a real-time algorithm for foreground-background segmentation. It allows us to capture structural background variation due to periodic-like motion over a long period of time under limited memory. Our codebook-based representation is efficient in memory and speed compared with other background modeling techniques. Our method can handle scenes containing moving backgrounds or illumination variations, and it achieves robust detection for different types of videos. In addition to the basic algorithm, three features improving the algorithm are presented - Automatic Parameter Estimation, Layered Modeling/Detection and Adaptive Codebook Updating.
Second, we introduce a performance evaluation methodology called Perturbation Detection Rate (PDR) analysis for measuring performance of foreground-background segmentation. It does not require foreground targets or knowledge of foreground distributions. It measures the sensitivity of a background subtraction algorithm in detecting possible low contrast targets against the background as a function of contrast. We compare four background subtraction algorithms using the methodology.
Third, a multi-view multi-hypothesis approach to segmenting and tracking multiple persons on a ground plane is proposed. The tracking state space is the set of ground points of the people being tracked. During tracking, several iterations of segmentation are performed using information from human appearance models and ground plane homography. Two innovations are made in this chapter - (1) To more precisely locate the ground location of a person, all center vertical axes of the person across views are mapped to the top-view plane to find the intersection point. (2) To tackle the explosive state space due to multiple targets and views, iterative segmentation-searching is incorporated into a particle filtering framework. By searching for people's ground point locations from segmentations, a set of a few good particles can be identified, resulting in low computational cost. In addition, even if all the particles are away from the true ground point, some of them move towards the true one through the iterated process as long as they are located nearby.
Finally, an objective no-reference measure is presented to assess fine-structure image/video quality. The proposed measure using local statistics reflects image degradation well in terms of noise
and blur