Robust environmental change detection using PTZ camera via spatial-temporal probabilistic modeling

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to detect environmental change using a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera. Conventional pixel-based comparison methods require precision PTZ mechanisms and a large memory for background scene storage. The proposed method represents each scene captured by the camera using a spatial-temporal statistical model with much less parameters. Although the detail of the environment covered by the camera is lost, this model is efficient and robust in detecting the changes in the environment. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by experiments in a complex environment and relationship between the environmental change and the feature space parameters are observed.