Dropped object detection in crowded scenes

Abstract

In the last decade, the topic of automated surveillance has become very important in the computer vision community. Especially important is the protection of critical transportation places and infrastructure like airport and railway stations. As a step in that direction, we consider the problem of detecting abandoned objects in a crowded scene. Assuming that the scene is being captured through a mid-field static camera, our approach consists of segmenting the foreground from the background and then using a change analyzer to detect any objects which meet certain criteria. In this thesis, we describe a background model and a method of bootstrapping that model in the presence of foreign objects in the foreground. We then use a Markov Random Field formulation to segment the foreground in image frames sampled periodically from the video camera. We use a change analyzer to detect foreground blobs that remain static through the scene and based on certain rules decide if the blob could be a potentially abandoned object.