A probabilistic pixel-based approach to detect humans in video streams

Human detection in video streams is an important task in many applications including video surveillance. Surprisingly, only few papers have been devoted to this topic. This paper presents a new approach to detect humans in video streams. Our approach is based on the temporal information present in videos. A background subtraction algorithm is first used to segment the silhouettes of the users and the moving objects. Then a classification process in two steps determines for each connected component if it corresponds to the silhouette of a human or not. During the first step, a probabilistic information is computed for each pixel independently. The information from a subset of pixels is then gathered to predict the class of the observed silhouette. This paper presents the principles and some results obtained on real silhouettes. It is shown that our approach is efficient for the detection of humans in video streams.