Detecting objects, shadows and ghosts in video streams by exploiting color and motion information

Many approaches to moving object detection for traffic monitoring and video surveillance proposed in the literature are based on background suppression methods. How to correctly and efficiently update the background model and how to deal with shadows are two of the more distinguishing and challenging features of such approaches. This work presents a general-purpose method for segmentation of moving visual objects (MVOs) based on an object-level classification in MVOs, ghosts and shadows. Background suppression needs a background model to be estimated and updated: we use motion and shadow information to selectively exclude from the background model MVOs and their shadows, while retaining ghosts. The color information (in the HSV color space) is exploited to shadow suppression and, consequently, to enhance both MVOs segmentation and background update.