Dynamic video object detection with single PTU camera

This paper presents a video object detection method under dynamic background with single PTU (pantilt unit) camera. The overall procedure contains two steps. First the moving object is tracked through interactive Mean Shift estimation and PTU control. Camera angular speed is updated online according to the estimated object position, whereby the object can remain in the center area of the image plane. In the second step, the foreground is detected through background subtraction and shape contour. An adaptive correlation thresholding method is applied to mitigate the detection distortion in boundary areas. Variational level set contour is then applied to further remove noises and locate moving areas. Our contribution is to incorporate in this procedure the special property of camera movement on a PTU to realize automatic tracking and efficient background matching for motion detection. As demonstrated in the experiment, the proposed method well outlines the foreground objects.