Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects

Abstract

Techniques for performing visual surveillance of one or more moving objects are provided. The techniques include registering one or more images captured by one or more cameras, wherein registering the one or more images comprises region-based registration of the one or more images in two or more adjacent frames, performing motion segmentation of the one or more images to detect one or more moving objects and one or more background regions in the one or more images, and tracking the one or more moving objects to facilitate visual surveillance of the one or more moving objects.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12 / 972,836, filed Dec. 20, 2010, incorporated by reference herein.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]Embodiments of the invention generally relate to information technology, and, more particularly, to object detection.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]In recent years, reconnaissance, surveillance, disaster relief, search and rescue, agriculture information gathering and fast remote sensing mapping has gained increasingly attentions in civilian and military purposes. For example, due to their small size and low-cost sensor platform, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be an attractive platform for executing such operations. However, UAV introduces some significant challenges when used in surveillance systems. For an instance, the background significantly changes as the camera has a fast motion and an irregular rotation, and the motion of a UAV vehicle is usually not smooth. Furth...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0083]One or more embodiments of the invention, or elements thereof, can be implemented in the form of an apparatus including a memory and at least one processor that is coupled to the memory and operative to perform exemplary method steps.

Problems solved by technology

However, UAV introduces some significant challenges when used in surveillance systems.

For an instance, the background significantly changes as the camera has a fast motion and an irregular rotation, and the motion of a UAV vehicle is usually not smooth.

Further, frame rate is very low (for example, 1 frame per second) so as to increase the difficulties of detecting and tracking ground moving targets, and small object size will bring another challenge for object detection and tracking.

Also, a camera's strong illumination change and stripe noise can create some hard problems to separate true moving objects from the background.

Existing approaches also include object initialization issues, and are additionally unable to obtain high-accuracy registration results, to handle rotation and scale variation of a target, and to deal with similar distribution between target and background.

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