System and method for detecting and tracking an object of interest in spatio-temporal space
View Patent ↗The present invention provides a system and method for detecting and tracking a moving object. First, robust change detection is applied to find initial candidate regions in consecutive frames. These initial detections in consecutive frames are stacked to produce space-time bands which are extracted by Hough transform and entropy minimization based band detection algorithm.
1. A method for processing incoming images in real-time, the method comprising:
applying a change detection procedure to detect at least one change in the image;
generating a 3D spatio-temporal volume of said change in the image;
converting the 3D spatio-temporal volume onto a 2D spatial-temporal image using Hough Transform; and
extracting a 2D band in said 2D spatial-temporal image, wherein said band is a trajectory of a moving object of interest in said image.
2. The method of claim 1 wherein said converting comprises reducing said 3D spatio-temporal volume into straight lines and clustering said straight lines to form the 2D band.
3. The method of claim 1 further comprising combining the extracted 2D bands from all the incoming images to track the moving object of interest.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein said change detection procedure comprises calculating image difference between two consecutive images.
5. The method of claim 4 wherein said generating comprises projecting the image difference onto a dimension where there is motion to generate the 3D spatio-temporal image, wherein said 3D spatio-temporal image comprise at least said moving object.
6. The method of claim 4 further comprising filtering said calculated image difference.
7. The method of claim 1 further comprising refining said extracted 2D band.
8. The method of claim 7 wherein said refining is based on entropy minimization.
9. The method of claim 1 further comprising filtering said extracted 2D band.
10. A system for processing incoming images in real-time, the method comprising:
a change detection module to detect at least one change in the image;
a 3D spatio-temporal module for generating a 3D spatio-temporal volume of said change in the image;
a Hough Transform module for converting the 3D spatio-temporal volume onto a 2D spatial-temporal band; and
a Band extraction module for extracting the 2D spatial-temporal band, wherein said band is a trajectory of a moving object of interest in said image.