Extraction of human body contours and position analysis

The paper presents a new method for extracting and positioning contours of moving objects. The method is applicable in the surveillance of elderly individuals and facilitates the detection of critical situations when the elderly individuals find themselves in need of immediate help. For this, single frames from the video sequence are extracted in regular time intervals and the position of the human body is analyzed. The position is traced using the body contours. For the surveillance, a static video camera is used. The body contours extraction is performed using two consecutive filters: the first — for the adaptive texture suppression, and the second — for the contours extraction. The main presumption is that the environment is known and this makes the influence of multiple variable parameters (illumination, shadows, etc.) lower. A Fourier descriptor is used for the body position analysis.