Moving object detection using region tracking

For many vision-based systems, it is important to detect a moving object automatically. The region-based motion estimation method is popular for automatic moving object detection. The region-based method has several advantages in that it is robust to noise and variations in illumination. However, there is a critical problem in that there exists an occlusion problem which is caused by the movement of the object. The occlusion problem results in an incorrect motion estimation and faulty detection of moving objects. When there are occlusion regions, the motion vector is not correctly estimated. That is, a stationary background in the occluded region can be classified as a moving object.In order to overcome this occlusion problem, a new occlusion detection algorithm is proposed. The proposed occlusion detection algorithm is motivated by the assumption that the distribution of the error histogram of the occlusion region is different from that of the nonocclusion region. The proposed algorithm uses the mean and variance values to decide whether an occlusion has occurred in the region. Therefore, the proposed occlusion detection and motion estimation scheme detects the moving regions and estimates the new motion vector, while avoiding misdetection caused by the occlusion problem. The experimental results for several video sequences demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach to the occlusion problem.This work was presented in part at the 8th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 24–26, 2003