Automatic video object shape extraction and its classification with camera in motion

In this paper, we present an automatic moving object extraction and classification system. For automatic extraction of object taken by a moving camera, a novel technique is proposed, in which optical flow handles the background modeling and camera motion estimation, and frame difference information yields the exact object shape. We also use forward region boundary based change detection approach for frame difference. This approach assures change detection for uniform intensity regions. For classification, weighted likelihood discriminant based shape classifier is designed. Unlike maximum likelihood (ML) methods, our proposed method utilizes information from all classes to design the classifier. In the description phase of the classifier, curvature features are extracted from the shape and are utilized to build a hidden Markov model (HMM). The HMM provides a robust ML description of the shape. In the discrimination phase, a weighted likelihood discriminant function is introduced, which weights the likelihoods of curvature at individual points of the shape to minimize the classification error. The weights are estimated by generalized probabilistic descent (GPD) method. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, we present results achieved for car shapes extraction and classification.