Detection of moving corners in dynamic images

Corners have become now one of the most commonly used features in image analysis, in particular, in motion analysis and stereo vision. There are many corner detection algorithms which can be classified into two groups. One is based on the extraction of object contours and followed by the analysis of their structures. The other works directly on the local grey values. In this paper, a moving corner detector for analysis of traffic movements is introduced which belongs to the second category. It comprises a corner response calculation component and a spatial temporal analysis part. The corner response calculation uses only the first order image derivatives, which is detected from Harris and Stephens´ combined corner edge detector. Spatio-temporal analysis combines both spatial and temporal information to suppress noise and is achieved through more than two images. Apart from some random noises digitization, there are some slight shifts in space from frame to frame. These cause some stationary corners with high contrast being picked up as moving corners. Results showed that this moving corner detector is reasonably successful in separating these stationary corners from moving ones