Detection and location of people in video images using adaptive fusion of color and edge information

A new method of finding people in video images is presented. The detection is based on a novel background modeling and subtraction approach which uses both color and edge information. We introduce confidence maps gray-scale images whose intensity is a function of confidence that a pixel has changed - to fuse intermediate results and represent the results of background subtraction. The latter is used to delineate a person's body by guiding contour collection to segment the person from the background. The method is tolerant to scene clutter, slow illumination changes, and camera noise, and runs in near real time on a standard platform.