Intelligent Nighttime Video Surveillance Using Multi-Intensity Infrared Illuminator

Abstract

In nighttime video surveillance, the image details of far objects are often hard to be identified due to poor illumination conditions while the image regions of near objects may be whitened due to overexposure. To alleviate the two problems simultaneously for nighttime video surveillance, we adopt a new multi-intensity infrared illuminator as a supportive light source to provide multiple illumination levels periodically. By using the illuminator with multiple degrees of illumination power, both far and near objects can be clearly captured. For automatic detection of foreground objects at different distances in the image sequences captured with the multi-intensity infrared illuminator, two foreground object detection methods are proposed in this paper. Experimental results show that the two methods both achieve >90% accuracy in average in foreground object detection while giving different computational complexities.