Robust segmentation of freight containers in train monitoring videos

This paper is about a vision-based system that automatically monitors intermodal freight trains for the quality of how the loads (containers) are placed along the train. An accurate and robust algorithm to segment the foreground of containers in videos of the moving train is indispensable for this purpose. Given a video of a moving train consisting of containers of different types, this paper presents a method exploiting the information in both frequency and spatial domains to segment these containers. This method can accurately segment all types of containers under a variety of background conditions, e.g illumination variations and moving clouds, in the train videos shot by a fixed camera. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are substantiated through a large number of experiments on real data of train videos.