System and method for object identification and behavior characterization using video analysis

A method of characterizing activity of an object using a computer comprising:

• detecting a foreground object of interest in video images;
• tracking said foreground object over a plurality of said video images;
• classifying said foreground object in said plurality of video images;
• and
• characterizing said activity of said foreground object based on comparison of said classifications to activity of a standard object;
• wherein said characterizing said activity includes:
• describing a sequence of postures as behavior primitives;
• and
• aggregating behavior primitives into actual behavior over a range of images;
• wherein said describing said behavior primitives further includes:
• identifying patterns of postures over a sequence of images;
• and
• analyzing temporal information selected from the group consisting of direction and magnitude of movement of the centroid, increase and decrease of the eccentricity, increase and decrease of the area, increase and decrease of the aspect ratio of the bounding box, change in the b-spline representation points, change in the convex hull points, and direction and magnitude of corner points.

A method for background subtraction of a video image, comprising the steps of:

• grouping a number of images into a set of video images;
• creating a standard deviation map of the grouped images;
• removing a bounding box area of said image where variation is above a predetermined threshold to create a/partial image;
• and
• combining said partial image with,an existing set of partial images by averaging the set of images to generate a complete background image deplete of a desired foreground object.