Automatic generation of passerby record images using Internet camera

Recently, many brutal crimes have shocked us. In addition, we have seen a decline in the number of solved crimes. Therefore, the importance of security and self‐defense has increased steadily. As an example of self‐defense, many surveillance cameras are set up in buildings, homes, and offices. But even if we want to detect a suspicious person, we cannot check the surveillance videos immediately so that a huge number of image sequences is stored in each video system. In this paper, we propose an automatic method of generating passerby record images by using an Internet camera. In the first step, the process of recognizing a passerby is carried out using an image sequence obtained from the Internet camera. Our method classifies the subject region of each person by using the space‐time image. In addition, we obtain the information of the time, direction, and number of passersby from this space‐time image. Next, the present method detects five characteristics: the center of gravity, the position of the person's head, the brightness, the size, and shape of the person. Finally, an image of each person is selected among the image sequence by integrating five characteristics, and is added into the passerby record image. Some experimental results using a simple experimental system are also reported, which indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In most scenes, every person was able to be detected by the proposed method and the passerby record image was generated. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 92(11): 42–50, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10146