Image Processing for Surveillance and Security

Image Processing For Visual Tracking

Automatic detection, tracking and anomaly identification occupy a considerable space in computer vision research and have many applications including intelligent surveillance, human-computer interaction (HCI), human-robot interaction (HRI), augmented reality (AR), medical applications and visual vehicle navigation etc. More importantly, recently there is a great deal of interest in robust visual tracking algorithms due to the increased need of automated video analysis relating safety in public places such as railway station, airport, shopping areas, religious festivals or governmental offices. This poses fundamental challenges in computer vision which involves input from image processing research along with input from machine learning community. In this section we discussed fundamental steps for visual tracking by dissecting the algorithms available in recent literature.

Image analysis for tracking consists of three key steps: 1) detection of interesting moving objects; 2) tracking moving objects in time lapsed frames and 3) analysis of tracked objects for behavioural study such as recognition, prediction and anomaly detection. One can broadly dissect the visual tracking algorithms in four different categories (Yilmaz et al., 2006; Haering et al., 2008; Yang et al., 2011): a) Object representation, b) Feature selection, c) Object detection and d) Object tracking. These categories can also be grouped and fitted into a classical image processing pyramid of low level, medium level, intermediate level and high level algorithms, based on the complexity and the type of data they process (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Image processing pyramid of visual tracking algorithms