Candidate generation and validation techniques for pedestrian detection in thermal (infrared) surveillance videos.
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Date
2022
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Abstract
Video surveillance systems have become prevalent. Factors responsible for this
prevalence include, but are not limited to, rapid advancements in technology, reduction in the cost of surveillance systems and changes in user demand. Research in video surveillance is majorly driven by rising global security needs which in turn increase the demand for proactive systems which monitor persistently. Persistent monitoring is a challenge for most video surveillance systems because they depend on visible light cameras. Visible light cameras depend on the presence of external light and can easily be undermined by over-, under, or non-uniform illumination. Thermal infrared cameras have been considered as alternatives to visible light cameras because they measure the intensity of infrared energy emitted from objects and so can function persistently. Many methods put forward make use of methods developed for visible footage, but these tend to underperform in infrared images due to different characteristics of thermal footage compared to visible footage. This thesis aims to increase the accuracy of pedestrian detection in thermal infrared surveillance footage by incorporating strategies into existing frameworks used in visible image processing techniques for IR pedestrian detection without the need to initially assume a model for the image distribution. Therefore, two novel techniques for candidate generation were formulated. The first is an Entropy-based histogram modication algorithm that incorporates a strategy for energy loss to iteratively modify the histogram of an image for background elimination and pedestrian retention. The second is a Background Subtraction method featuring a strategy for building a reliable background image without needing to use the whole video frame. Furthermore, pedestrian detection involves simultaneously solving several sub-tasks while adapting each task with IR-speci_c adaptations. Therefore, a novel semi-supervised single model for pedestrian detection was formulated that eliminates the need for separate modules of candidate generation and validation by integrating region and boundary properties of the image with motion patterns such that all the _ne-tuning and adjustment happens during energy minimization. Performance evaluations have been performed on four publicly available benchmark surveillance datasets consisting of footage taken under a wide variety of weather conditions and taken from different perspectives.
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Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu- Natal, Durban.