Real-time video-shot detection for scene surveillance applications.

In this paper, a surveillance system with automatic video-shot detection and indexing capabilities is presented. The proposed system aims at detecting the presence of abandoned objects in a guarded environment and at automatically performing online semantic video segmentation in order to facilitate the human operator's task of retrieving the cause of an alarm. The former task is performed by operating image segmentation based on temporal rank-order filtering, followed by classification in order to reduce false alarms. The latter task is performed by operating temporal video segmentation when an alarm is detected. In the clips of interest, the key frame is the one depicting a person leaving a dangerous object, and is determined on the basis of a feature indicating the movement around the dangerous region. Experimental results are reported in terms of static region detection, classification, clip and key-frame detection errors versus different levels of complexity of the guarded environment, in order to establish the performance that can be expected from the system in different situations.

A new approach to vector median filtering based on space filling curves.

The availability of a wide set of multidimensional information sources in different application fields (e.g., color cameras, multispectral remote sensing imagery devices, etc.) is the basis for the interest of image processing research on extensions of scalar nonlinear filtering approaches to multidimensional data filtering. A new approach to multidimensional median filtering is presented. The method is structured into two steps. Absolute sorting of the vectorial space based on Peano space filling curves is proposed as a preliminary step in order to map vectorial data onto an appropriate one-dimensional (1-D) space. Then, a scalar median filtering operation is applied. The main advantage of the proposed approach is the computational efficiency of the absolute sorting step, which makes the method globally faster than existing median filtering techniques. This is particularly important when dealing with a large amount of data (e.g., image sequences). Presented results also show that the filtering performances of the proposed approach are comparable with those of vector median filters presented in the literature.

A distributed probabilistic system for adaptive regulation of image processing parameters.

A distributed optimization framework and its application to the regulation of the behavior of a network of interacting image processing algorithms are presented. The algorithm parameters used to regulate information extraction are explicitly represented as state variables associated with all network nodes. Nodes are also provided with message-passing procedures to represent dependences between parameter settings at adjacent levels. The regulation problem is defined as a joint-probability maximization of a conditional probabilistic measure evaluated over the space of possible configurations of the whole set of state variables (i.e., parameters). The global optimization problem is partitioned and solved in a distributed way, by considering local probabilistic measures for selecting and estimating the parameters related to specific algorithms used within the network. The problem representation allows a spatially varying tuning of parameters, depending on the different informative contents of the subareas of an image. An application of the proposed approach to an image processing problem is described. The processing chain chosen as an example consists of four modules. The first three algorithms correspond to network nodes. The topmost node is devoted to integrating information derived from applying different parameter settings to the algorithms of the chain. The nodes associated with data-transformation processes to be regulated are represented by an optical sensor and two filtering units (for edge-preserving and edge-extracting filterings), and a straight-segment detection module is used as an integration site.