Automatic pedestrian recognition in uncontrolled urban environment

This paper presents a real time system for automatic pedestrian recognition using image sequences analysis. We first introduce a robust motion detector of moving objects in an uncontrolled urban environment. This motion detector is based on the stability of the background structure. The verification of the presence of this background structure can be sufficient to detect intrusion (pedestrian, bus, car ...) in the surveillance area. The biggest advantage of this detector is that it is less influenced by illumination changes than other classical detection algorithms. The quality of the detection is improved when the background is high textured. The second step consists in the interpretation of this detection signal which allows us to separate pedestrians from other moving objects. The pedestrian discrimination process has been tested with real traffic image sequences. The percentage of good pedestrian discrimination is about 85%.