Motion pattern extraction and event detection for automatic visual surveillance

Abstract

Efficient analysis of human behavior in video surveillance scenes is a very challenging problem. Most traditional approaches fail when applied in real conditions and contexts like amounts of persons, appearance ambiguity, and occlusion. In this work, we propose to deal with this problem by modeling the global motion information obtained from optical flow vectors. The obtained direction and magnitude models learn the dominant motion orientations and magnitudes at each spatial location of the scene and are used to detect the major motion patterns. The applied region-based segmentation algorithm groups local blocks that share the same motion direction and speed and allows a subregion of the scene to appear in different patterns. The second part of the approach consists in the detection of events related to groups of people which are merge, split, walk, run, local dispersion, and evacuation by analyzing the instantaneous optical flow vectors and comparing the learned models. The approach is validated and experimented on standard datasets of the computer vision community. The qualitative and quantitative results are discussed. Copyright 2011 Yassine Benabbas et al.