Identifying foreground from multiple images

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel foreground extraction method that automatically identifies image regions corresponding to a common space region seen from multiple cameras. We assume that background regions present some color coherence in each image and we exploit the spatial consistency constraint that several image projections of the same space region must satisfy. Integrating both color and spatial consistency constraints allows to fully automatically segment foreground and background regions in multiple images. In contrast to standard background subtraction approaches, the proposed approach does not require any a priori knowledge on the background nor user interactions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for multiple camera setups with experimental results on standard real data sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.