Entropy based region selection for moving object detection

This article addresses a problem of moving object detection by combining two kinds of segmentation schemes: temporal and spatial. It has been found that consideration of a global thresholding approach for temporal segmentation, where the threshold value is obtained by considering the histogram of the difference image corresponding to two frames, does not produce good result for moving object detection. This is due to the fact that the pixels in the lower end of the histogram are not identified as changed pixels (but they actually correspond to the changed regions). Hence there is an effect on object background classification. In this article, we propose a local histogram thresholding scheme to segment the difference image by dividing it into a number of small non-overlapping regions/windows and thresholding each window separately. The window/block size is determined by measuring the entropy content of it. The segmented regions from each window are combined to find the (entire) segmented image. This thresholded difference image is called the change detection mask (CDM) and represent the changed regions corresponding to the moving objects in the given image frame. The difference image is generated by considering the label information of the pixels from the spatially segmented output of two image frames. We have used a Markov Random Field (MRF) model for image modeling and the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation (for spatial segmentation) is done by a combination of simulated annealing (SA) and iterated conditional mode (ICM) algorithms. It has been observed that the entropy based adaptive window selection scheme yields better results for moving object detection with less effect on object background (mis) classification. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is successfully tested over three video sequences. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.