Advances in Shadow Removing for Motion Detection Algorithms

Abstract

Detecting moving objects is very important in many application contexts such as people detection and recognition, visual surveillance, automatic generation of video effects, and so on. Motion detection algorithms are very sensible to light conditions; in particular they suffer the presence of shadows and sudden changes due to light switches. Here we propose an additional module that can be applied to a generic gray-level motion detection algorithm. The only requirement is the presence of a reference image (background model). The main idea of the proposed approach is that variations in light conditions alter the intensity values of pixels in the image, but the basic structures in the scene remain unchanged. The algorithm we propose is based on the correlation between regions selected from the reference image and the current one. The experiments have been performed on image sequences acquired both in indoor and outdoor environments with natural and artificial lights.