A software for performance evaluation and comparison of people detection and tracking methods in video processing

Digital video content analysis is an important item for multimedia content-based indexing (MCBI), content-based video retrieval (CBVR) and visual surveillance systems. There are some frequently-used generic object detection and/or tracking (D&T) algorithms in the literature, such as Background Subtraction (BS), Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift (CMS), Optical Flow (OF) and etc. An important problem for performance evaluation is the absence of stable and flexible software for comparison of different algorithms. This software is able to compare them with the same metrics in real-time and at the same platform. In this paper, we have designed and implemented the software for the performance comparison and the evaluation of well-known video object D&T algorithms (for people D&T) at the same platform. The software works as an automatic and/or semi-automatic test environment in real-time, which uses the image and video processing essentials, e.g. morphological operations and filters, and ground-truth (GT) XML data files, charting/plotting capabilities and etc.