Removing Shadows for the Surveillance System Using a Video Camera

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In the images of a video camera employed for surveillance, detecting targets by extracting foreground image is of great importance. The foreground regions detected, however, include not only moving targets but also their shadows. This paper presents a novel technique to detect shadow pixels in the foreground image of a video camera. The image characteristics of video cameras employed, a web-cam and a CCD, are first analysed in the HSV color space and a pixel-level shadow detection technique is proposed based on the analysis. Compared with existing techniques where unified criteria are used to all pixels, the proposed technique determines shadow pixels utilizing a fact that the effect of shadowing to each pixel is different depending on its brightness in background image. Such an approach can accommodate local features in an image and hold consistent performance even in changing environment. In experiments targeting pedestrians, the proposed technique showed better results compared with an existing technique.