Segmenting moving object: the MODEST video object kernel
Segmentation is one of the fundamental problems in image processing.
Although human beings and most animals perform this task in a
relatively straightforward manner, years of research and developments
in machine vision have not yet succeeded to match the same
performance. The problem of segmentation is difficult not only because
of the complexity of mechanisms involved in it, but also because it is
ill posed and in this sense, no unique solution exists to segment a
scene. In most situations, a priori knowledge on the nature of the
problem (or its solution) is needed, often as a function of the
specific application in which the segmentation tool is to be used. A
segmentation process leads to a partition of an image or a video
sequence into regions according to a given criterion. Many of the
above-mentioned applications aim at locating moving objects in the
observed scene, thus a change detector can naturally drive the
segmentation in a more efficient way. Change detection analysis
provides a classification of the pixels in the video sequence into one
out of two classes: foreground (moving objects) and background.
To this end, we combine a change detector with a background updating
technique. On one hand, the change detector is designed to precisely
detect object contours and to be robust to camera noise. On the other
hand, the adaptive background scheme accounts for slow environmental
light changes. The combination of the two (called the Video Object
Kernel) allows to automatically detect multiple moving objects in long
video sequences recorded by a monocular static camera. The foreground
objects identified by the Video Object Kernel are then tracked along
time. A successive step tranforms the 2D tracked shapes in 3D
shapes. The description of the 3D shapes is finally given to the
content understanding module which derives decisions on the observed
scene.
A description of the
Video Object Kernel is given in "Segmenting moving object: the MODEST
video object kernel". The sequences with the segmented moving
objects presented in the paper are available below:
Hall Monitor
Group
Highway 1
Highway 2
A description of the complete MODEST surveillance system is given in "Video-Based Multi-Agent Traffic Surveillance System".
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