MI3: Multi-intensity infrared illumination video database

Vision-based video surveillance systems have gained increasing popularity. However, their functionality is substantially limited under nighttime conditions due to the poor visibility caused by improper illumination. Equipped on night vision cameras, ordinary infrared (IR) illuminators of fixed-intensity usually lead to the imaging problem of overexposure (or underexposure) when the object is too close to (or too far from) the camera. To overcome this limitation, we use a novel multi-intensity IR illuminator to extend the effective range of distance of camera surveillance, and establish in this paper the MI3 (Multi-Intensity Infrared Illumination) database based on such an illuminator. The database contains intensity varying video sequences of several indoor and outdoor scenes. Ground truths including people counting and foreground labelling are provided for different research usages. Performances of related algorithms are tested for demonstration and evaluation.