Figure 4. A panoramic image mosaiced by UAV video
image sequence
3. MOTION DETECTION
The compensation has reduced the impact of background
motion, but there are still some influences of it remain in the
stabilized image. Motion detection divides the video image into
target and background whether it is moving or not. There are
many processing methods introduced into motion detection, and
the common point of them is the using of motion information.
For static background, it usually processes on the background,
such as background modeling method. For moving background,
it assumes the dynamic image just has target and background
two partitions, and if there are more than one target in the video,
it will segment the image into numbers of partitions
corresponding to the targets, and in some methods it sets the
targets on different layers in order to make the process much
faster. The primary information for detecting is motion
information, or the intensity changes between adjacent video
image frames.
3.1 Motion Detection
For video image captured by moving camera, the background
motion can’t be counteracted absolutely through image
stabilization. It may not effective enough to detect the moving
target by restraining the movement of background. All the
image information could be classified into three kinds: target,
background and noise. Different classes correspond to different
motion fields in dynamic image. If we know the class
characteristics of points, we can use them to fit the parametric
sets of different motion regions. Contrarily, if we know the
parameters of motion vectors, we could divide the pixels into
different fields according motion information. In most of cases,
both of the characteristics and parameters are unknown. The
clustering of image pixels is a probability question. A typical
solution for motion classification is uniting the mixture
probability model and EM—Expectation Maximum algorithm
(Weiss et al., 1996).
In practice, it can make a hypothesis that there are two layers in
the dynamic image, background layer and target layer. After
image stabilization, calculating the motion vectors of all pixels
and assuming that the flow vectors of target layer is larger than
the ones of background layer to estimate the weights of mixture
model with iterated computation. It will have the target detected
until the iteration convergence. The parameters of image
registration could be the initial values of iteration. Figure 5
presents a detection result for one vehicle target in three frames.
Motion segmentation is a kind of video segmentation, because
it partitions video or image sequence into spatio-temporal
regions basing on motion information. Therefore, it is
essentially same as the motion detection. Generally, motion
segmentation has two basic classes that optical flow
segmentation methods and direct methods (Bovik et al., 2005).
In perfect cases, there are just two kinds of optical flow
associated with the movements of background and target.
However, optical flow is not an exact reflection of motion field
but an explanation of illumination change. Therefore, it is not
rigorous to perform the segmentation with the optical flow
information only.
A usually adoption is grouping in motion feature space to
realize the segmentation. How to set the relation between
clustering and dynamic image is another question. The method
of graph theory is a natural solution for motion segmentation.
Pixels in image sequence could be taken as the nodes of graph,
and if we partition the graph, according motion features, may
segment the image at the same time. Edge the weight means the
similarity of features between the two nodes which connected
by it. In motion segmentation, this similarity measurement is
the motion feature vector of each pixel. The graph is not
constructed in one image frame. It should connect all the nodes
in a spatiotemporal region, and the region may across several
frames. After the construction of the weighted graph, it could
segment the video image sequence using by normalized cut
method (Shi et al., 1998). In order to reduce the complication of
computing, an effective solution is subsampling the image
sequence by setting spatiotemporal window that just connect
the nodes in this window when constructing the weighted graph.
4. OBJECT TRACKING
After detecting the location of target in image, object tracking
will persistently lock the position of target during a period. The
basic idea of object tracking is modeling the object according to
object’s feature characteristic property and choosing
appropriate tracking method. Different form motion detection
emphasizing on accuracy, object tracking couldn’t abide taking
too much time on computing and needs giving attention on both
processing speed and precision, so it has to abstract the target
through feature extraction and object modeling. Simply the
features used could be shape, size, direction and velocity of the
moving object, and complicatedly it could be feature points set,
color space and so on. Combining with respective technical
approach, it will realize the target tracking. The essence of
object modeling is trying to define the target uniquely, and in