Unsupervised statistical detection of changing objects in camera-in-motion video

Change detection in image sequences has mainly focused on the recovery of moving objects when the viewing system is static, or on the detection of simple production effects such as video shot boundaries or scene transitions. Camera motion is usually handled by the compensation of dominant motion, using motion estimation and segmentation schemes. We propose a novel statistical change detection method able to handle more complex events such as entering or exiting objects, or changes in object appearance, when the camera is moving. Temporal changes of objects are captured by analyzing the statistics of successive images. Considering an appropriate choice of image features, we show how it is possible to extract the statistics of changing objects from a pair of successive image histograms. Changing objects are then located by statistical backprojection techniques. The method is completely unsupervised and does not require any motion estimation or motion compensation. It is illustrated here on real world road scenes exhibiting large camera motion