Illumination-Invariant Change Detection

Moving objects in image sequences acquired by a static camera can be detected by analyzing the grey-level difference between successive frames. Direct motion detection, however, will also detect fast variations of scene illumination. This paper describes a method for motion detection that is considerably less sensitive to time-varying illumination. It is based on combining a motion detection algorithm with an homomorphic filter which effectively suppresses variable scene illumination. To this end, the acquired image sequence is modelled as being generated by an illumination and a reflectance component that are approximately separated by the filter. Detection of changes in the reflectance component is directly related to scene changes, i.e., object motion. Real video data are used to illustrate the system's performance.