Reliable moving object extraction and counting

This work adopts background subtraction, modified edge-following, connected component to develop automatic extraction of moving objects in a video sequence. Additionally, the number of moving objects at an interval can be effectively counted. In the proposed method, pixels at a specific position of successive image frames are first processed by the modified iterative threshold selection technique to determine the background gray-level value. Pixels at all positions employ such an iterative technique to establish the background. Second, an original image is subtracted by this background to obtain a difference image that is added with the differential image between an original image and its precedent neighboring image to yield an image with many edge points of moving objects. Third, the robust edge-following scheme manipulates this edge-point image to produce the closed-form objects that are then conducted by the morphological operation to yield complete objects. The practical implementation reveals that the proposed method can precisely and reliably estimate the traffic amount.