Detecting ghost and left objects insurveillance video

This paper proposes an efficient method for detecting ghost and left objects in surveillance video, which, if not identified, may lead to errors or wasted computational power in background modeling and object tracking in video surveillance systems. This method contains two main steps: the first one is to detect stationary objects, which narrows down the evaluation targets to a very small number of regions in the input image; the second step is to discriminate the candidates between ghost and left objects. For the first step, we introduce a novel stationary object detection method based on continuous object tracking and shape matching. For the second step, we propose a fast and robust inpainting method to differentiate between ghost and left objects by reconstructing the real background using the candidate's corresponding regions in the current input and background image. The effectiveness of our method has been validated by experiments over a variety of video sequences and comparisons with existing state-of-art methods. © 2009 World Scientific Publishing Company