A method of motion analysis using spatiotemporal image-directional temporal plane transform

Some of the recent image processing methods proposed for detecting object moving in 3-D space form a spatiotemporal image by placing consecutive camera images side by side in temporal order. This paper presents one such method, the directional temporal plane transform method (DTT), an image processing method that is not influenced by environmental changes. Assuming that the objects are moving on a nearly constant path, DTT first extracts significant data about these objects from each image, and then makes a 1-D data stream by projecting the data long a directional axis parallel to the moving loci. After that, by placing the 1-D data from individual frames side by side in temporal order, the spatiotemporal image is transformed into a 2-D image on a directional temporal plane. Since the object motion is represented by regions of this 2-D image, moving objects can be detected by simple 2-D image processing. This method was used on an experimental basis to detect vehicles running along a road. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the method. An advantage of this method is its ability to detect vehicles using the same processing during both daytime and nighttime-a feature that has not been achieved with conventional methods.