Integration of thermal and visible imagery for robust foreground detection in tele-immersive spaces

Tele-immersive systems are designed to facilitate communication and collaboration between people. Therefore, the central objects of interest in a tele-immersive system are these people, the things they jointly manipulate, and the tools they need to perform this manipulation. This paper presents a multi-modal image fusion framework to detect these objects of interest. Experimental results with a prototype tele-immersive system show that fusion of visible and thermal imagery enables robust foreground detection in unstructured environments. The contribution of this work lies in designing the integration framework, prototyping hardware and software components, and evaluating quantitatively the multi-modal foreground detection for a set of standard scenarios.