Shadow Removal in Outdoor Video Sequences by Automatic Thresholding of Division Images

Several video-based applications, such as video surveillance, traffic monitoring, video annotation, etc., rely on the correct detection and tracking of moving objects within the observed scene. Even though several works have been proposed in the field of moving object detection, many of them do not consider the problem of segmenting real objects from their shadows. The shadow is considered part of the object, thus leading to possibly large errors in the subsequent steps of object localisation and tracking. In this paper we propose a shadow detection algorithm able to remove shadows from the blobs of moving objects, using division images and Expectation-Maximization histogram analysis. Experimental results prove that the use of the proposed method can significantly increase the performance of a video analysis system.

[1]  Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos,et al.  Learning to Detect Moving Shadows in Dynamic Environments , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[2]  Mohan M. Trivedi,et al.  Detecting Moving Shadows: Algorithms and Evaluation , 2003, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[3]  Osama Masoud,et al.  Moving Shadow Detection with Low- and Mid-Level Reasoning , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Rita Cucchiara,et al.  Improving shadow suppression in moving object detection with HSV color information , 2001, ITSC 2001. 2001 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems. Proceedings (Cat. No.01TH8585).

[5]  Yair Weiss,et al.  Deriving intrinsic images from image sequences , 2001, Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2001.

[6]  François Brémond,et al.  ETISEO, performance evaluation for video surveillance systems , 2007, 2007 IEEE Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance.

[7]  T. Moon.  The expectation-maximization algorithm , 1996, IEEE Signal Process. Mag..

[8]  How a visual surveillance system hypothesizes how you behave , 2006, Behavior research methods.

[9]  Cheng Lu,et al.  On the removal of shadows from images , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[10]  Alessandro Bevilacqua,et al.  Effective Shadow Detection in Traffic Monitoring Applications , 2003, WSCG.

[11]  R. Cucchiara,et al.  Statistic and knowledge-based moving object detection in traffic scenes , 2000, ITSC2000. 2000 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems. Proceedings (Cat. No.00TH8493).