Fast image motion segmentation for surveillance applications

Wireless, battery-powered camera networks are becoming of increasing interest for surveillance and monitoring applications. The computational power of these platforms is often limited in order to reduce energy consumption. In addition, many embedded processors do not have floating point support in hardware. Among the visual tasks that a visual sensor node may be required to perform, motion analysis is one of the most basic and relevant. Events of interest are usually characterized by the presence of moving objects or persons. Knowledge of the direction of motion and velocity of a moving body may be used to take actions such as sending an alarm or triggering other camera nodes in the network. We present a fast algorithm for identifying moving areas in an image. The algorithm is efficient and amenable to implementation in fixed point arithmetic. Once the moving blobs in an image have been precisely localized, the average velocity vector can be computed using a small number of floating point operations. Our procedure starts by determining an initial labeling of image blocks based on local differential analysis. Then, belief propagation is used to impose spatial coherence and to resolve aperture effect inherent in texture less areas. A detailed analysis of the computational cost of the algorithm and of the provisions that must be taken in order to avoid overflow with 32-bit words is included. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.