Model-free tracking of cars and people based on color regions

Abstract This paper exploits a simple but general technique to extract object models from arbitrary image sequences. Such object models can be used to structure and index the image sequence. The algorithm extracts and tracks homogenous regions, which may correspond to objects or object parts. By grouping similar moving regions, the algorithm constructs models of potential objects. As such, the approach is model-free in the sense that it does not use a priori models to detect, track, and segment objects. On the contrary, the ultimate goal of the approach is to build such models automatically from image sequences. In this paper, the approach is applied to an image sequence taken by a static camera overlooking a parking lot. Due to the general formulation of the approach it can be used to extract any object from image sequences including cars and people. Tracking results for cars and people are reported. For evaluation purposes all participants of the PETS 2000 workshop 1 were given the same image sequences.