Detecting people in videos for their immersion in a virtual space

This paper presents an application developed to extract people in indoor or outdoor environments using a fixed camera. People are then inserted, in real time, into a dynamic comics environment in which they interact as actors or/and witnesses. The originality of our method relies on two main points. First, the change detection method combines two kinds of masks: region and contour masks. Then, in order to detect people who are moving or not, a reference image is introduced. It is built and updated, taking into account not only local changes in the sequence, but also global, either slow or fast, illumination changes that often occur when the sequence lasts several hours. Results show that people are well and quickly extracted.