A contour-based moving object detection

We propose a fast and robust approach to the detection of moving objects. Our method is based on using lines computed by a gradient-based optical flow and an edge detector. While it is known among researchers that gradient-based optical flow and edges are well matched for accurate computation of velocity, not much attention is paid to creating systems for detecting objects using this feature. In our method, extracted edges by using optical flow and the edge detector are restored as lines, and background lines of the previous frame are subtracted. Contours of objects are obtained by using snakes to clustered lines. The experimental results on outdoor-scenes show fast and robust performance of our method. The computation time of our method is 0.089 s/frame on a 900 MHz processor. © 2009 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.