Advanced surveillance systems:: Combining video and thermal imagery for pedestrian detection

In the current context of increased surveillance and security, more sophisticated surveillance systems are needed. One idea relies on the use of pairs of video (visible spectrum) and thermal infrared (IR) cameras located around premises of interest. To automate the system, a dedicated image processing approach is required, which is described in the paper. The first step in the proposed study is to collect a database of known scenarios both indoor and outdoor with a few pedestrians. These image sequences (video and TIR) are synchronized, geometrically corrected and temperature calibrated. The next step is to develop a segmentation strategy to extract the regions of interest (ROI) corresponding to pedestrians in the images. The retained strategy exploits the motion in the sequences. Next, the ROIs are grouped from image to image separately for both video and TIR sequences before a fusion algorithm proceeds to track and detect humans. This insures a more robust performance. Finally, specific criteria of size and temperature relevant to humans are introduced as well. Results are presented for a few typical situations.