Focal-plane moving object segmentation for realtime video surveillance

In this paper a new technique for segmenting and tracking moving objects in a user-defined control area is presented. It is based on an active contours technique called pixel-level snakes (PLS) whose capabilities to manage changes of contour topology and to introduce additional constraints in the contour evolution are used to define a control area as well as to segment and track moving objects. Furthermore, PLS can reach a very high speed of response when they are implemented on a pixel-parallel hardware platform. To illustrate the validity of the proposal some examples and results regarding the computation time achieved in the implementation of the proposed algorithm on a cellular processor array (SCAMP-3 vision chip) have been included.