Detection of moving objects using a spatiotemporal representation

The problem of moving object detection using a moving observer is addressed. The problem is investigated for long image sequences. The frames of an image sequence are stacked together to form a 3D spatiotemporal cube. A set of 2-D temporal slices which are termed epipolar plane images (EPIs) is then extracted from the cube along specific direction determined by a tracking process. For static scenes, each EPI is a structured image in which the trajectories are constrained by mathematical functions of time. We show that the problem of moving object detection is equivalent to the inspection of violation of such constraints. Experimental results on real sequences reveal that this approach is robust and reliable. Moreover, the algorithm is capable of detecting multiple moving objects in the scene