Image change detectio algorithms : A systematic survey

Detecting regions of change in multiple images of the same scene taken at different times is of widespread interest due to a large number of applications in diverse disciplines, including remote sensing, surveillance, medical diagnosis and treatment, civil infrastructure, and underwater sensing. This paper presents a systematic survey of the common processing steps and core decision rules in modern change detection algorithms, including significance and hypothesis testing, predictive models, the shading model, and background modeling. We also discuss important preprocessing methods, approaches to enforcing the consistency of the change mask, and principles for evaluating and comparing the performance of change detection algorithms. It is hoped that our classification of algorithms into a relatively small number of categories will provide useful guidance to the algorithm designer.

/pdf/image-change-detection-algorithms-a-systematic-survey-12jm18l0hn.pdf

Image change detection algorithms: a systematic survey

Automatic understanding of events happening at a site is the ultimate goal for many visual surveillance systems. Higher level understanding of events requires that certain lower level computer vision tasks be performed. These may include detection of unusual motion, tracking targets, labeling body parts, and understanding the interactions between people. To achieve many of these tasks, it is necessary to build representations of the appearance of objects in the scene. This paper focuses on two issues related to this problem. First, we construct a statistical representation of the scene background that supports sensitive detection of moving objects in the scene, but is robust to clutter arising out of natural scene variations. Second, we build statistical representations of the foreground regions (moving objects) that support their tracking and support occlusion reasoning. The probability density functions (pdfs) associated with the background and foreground are likely to vary from image to image and will not in general have a known parametric form. We accordingly utilize general nonparametric kernel density estimation techniques for building these statistical representations of the background and the foreground. These techniques estimate the pdf directly from the data without any assumptions about the underlying distributions. Example results from applications are presented.

/pdf/background-and-foreground-modeling-using-nonparametric-3hd5hi168b.pdf

Background and foreground modeling using nonparametric kernel density estimation for visual surveillance

Computing the motions of several moving objects in image sequences involves simultaneous motion analysis and segmentation. This task can become complicated when image motion changes significantly between frames, as with camera vibrations. Such vibrations make tracking in longer sequences harder, as temporal motion constancy cannot be assumed. The problem becomes even more difficult in the case of transparent motions.

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~irani/PAPERS/multiple_motions.pdf

Computing occluding and transparent motions

The paper considers two problems associated with the detection and classification of motion in image sequences obtained from a static camera. Motion is detected by differencing a reference and the "current" image frame, and therefore requires a suitable reference image and the selection of an appropriate detection threshold. Several threshold selection methods are investigated, and an algorithm based on hysteresis thresholding is shown to give acceptably good results over a number of test image sets. The second part of the paper examines the problem of detecting shadow regions within the image which are associated with the object motion. This is based on the notion of a shadow as a semi-transpare nt region in the image which retains a (reduced contrast) representation of the underlying surface pattern, texture or grey value. The method uses a region growing algorithm which uses a growing criterion based on a fixed attenuation of the photometric gain over the shadow region, in comparison to the reference image.

/pdf/image-difference-threshold-strategies-and-shadow-detection-37sv86mbe1.pdf

Image difference threshold strategies and shadow detection

Modeling the image as a piecewise linear gray-value function of the pixel coordinates considerably improved a change detection test based previously on a piecewise constant gray-value function. These results encouraged investigations into modeling the picture as a mosaic of patches where the gray-value function within each patch is described as a second-order bivariate polynomial of the pixel coordinates. Such a more appropriate model allowed the assumption to be made that the remaining gray-value variation within each patch can be attributed to noise related to the sensing and digitizing devices, independent of the individual image frames in a sequence. This assumption made it possible to relate the likelihood test for change detection to well-known statistical tests ( t test, F test), facilitating the determination of threshold values related to a priori confidence limits.

Y. Z. Hsu

Papers

New likelihood test methods for change detection in image sequences