The effects of motion and spatio-temporal non-uniform illumination on image-pair joint scattergrams

Accurate and robust image change detection and motion segmentation has been of substantial interest in the image processing and computer vision communities. Spatio-temporal illumination effects such as complex lighting effects involving moving light bands or moving shadow bands can confuse existing motion segmentation algorithms, which are based on analysing the greyscale image directly. While efforts have been made to improve the robustness of motion segmentation algorithms under varying illumination, the results to date are still not completely satisfactory. We propose using the joint scattergrarn between two images as the representational space for analyzing motion. These scattergrams have properties which can distinguish motion from complex illumination changes. We verify these properties of the scattergram on image datasets captured in the laboratory as well as outdoors and show its utility as a robust representational domain.