Detecting moving humans using color and infrared video

We approach the task of human silhouette extraction from color and infrared video using automatic image registration. Image registration between color and thermal images is a challenging problem due to the difficulties associated with finding correspondence. However the moving people in a static scene provide cues to address this problem. In this paper we propose a hierarchical scheme to automatically find the correspondence between the preliminary human silhouettes extracted from color and infrared video for image registration. Next, we discuss some strategies for probabilistically combining cues from registered color and thermal images. It is shown that the proposed approach achieves good results for image registration and human silhouette extraction. Experimental results also show a comparison of sensor fusion strategies and demonstrate the improvement in performance for human silhouette extraction.