A Technique to Detect the Shadow Pixels of Moving Objects in the Images of a Video Camera

In video surveillance and monitoring (VSAM), extracting foreground by detecting moving regions is the most fundamental step. The foreground extracted, however, includes not only objects in motion but also their shadows, which may cause errors in following video image processing steps. To remove the shadows, this paper presents a new technique to determine shadow pixels in the foreground image of a VSAM camera system. The proposed technique utilizes a fact that the effect of shadowing to each pixel is different defending on its brightness in a background image when determining shadow pixels unlike existing techniques where unified decision criteria are used to all pixels. Such an approach can easily accommodate local features in an image and hold consistent Performance even in changing environment. In real experiments, the proposed technique showed better results compared with an existing technique.