Context-independent video monitoring of mobile objects with color/thermal sensor

摘要

Automated video monitoring of mobile objects is a growing trend in many sectors, especially in surveillance applications. Many research groups are addressing substantial efforts to develop autonomous applications able to recognize specified events. Reliability of such a system is mainly defined by its ability to extract and to track features of interest in image sequences. Since the capacity to perform this basic task is strongly related to changes in image contrast, video monitoring units made up mono-spectral sensors offer limited performances in many situations. The best example of such a limitation is the uselessness of a visible CCD camera in low brightness scene. To overcome these shortcomings, we developed an acquisition unit including an uncooled VO_x thermal camera (8-12 μrn) and a High-Dynamic-Range-CMOS~((R)) color camera more suitable for outdoor applications. Unlike similar systems, we perform image registration at hardware level rather than at software level. Advantageous characteristics of such a design are presented in this paper. A simple framework is also proposed in order to achieve context-independent event extraction from color and thermal information.