Advanced video surveillance with pan tilt zoom cameras

In this paper an advanced video surveillance system is proposed.Our goal is the detection of the people’s heads toallow their obscuration for privacy issues or to performrecognition tasks. We propose a system based on active PTZ(Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras that produce head images havinga large enough size, and can cover an area larger than stillcameras. Since conventional approaches are not suitable toPTZ cameras, the proposed approach is based on the socalleddirection histograms to compute the ego-motion andon frame differencing for detecting moving objects. It exploitspost-processing and active contours to extract preciseshape of moving objects to be fed to a probabilistic algorithmto track moving people in the scene. Person following,instead, is based on simple heuristic rules that movethe camera as soon as the selected person is close to theborder of the field of view. Finally, a color and shape basedhead detection that takes advantage of the people trackingis presented. Experimental results on a live active camerademonstrate the feasibility of real-time person followingand of the consecutive head detection phase.