Real-time background subtraction-based video surveillance of people by integrating local texture patterns

This paper presents a real-time surveillance system for detecting and tracking people, which takes full advantage of local texture patterns, under a stationary monocular camera. A novel center-symmetric scale invariant local ternary pattern feature is put forward to combine with pattern kernel density estimation for building a pixel-level-based background model. The background model is then used to detect moving foreground objects on every newly captured frame. A variant of a fast human detector that utilizes local texture patterns is adopted to look for human objects from the foreground regions, and it is assisted by a head detector, which is proposed to find in advance the candidate locations of human, to reduce computational costs. Each human object is given a unique identity and is represented by a spatio-color-texture object model. The real-time performance of tracking is achieved by a fast mean-shift algorithm coupled with several efficient occlusion-handling techniques. Experiments on challenging video sequences show that the proposed surveillance system can run in real-time and is quite robust in segmenting and tracking people in complex environments that include appearance changes, abrupt motion, occlusions, illumination variations and clutter.