US 8,045,761 B2Granted

Detection of environmental conditions in a sequence of images

AssigneeIntelliview Technologies Inc.

InventorsWael Badawy, Mohammed Shehata, Muzamil Shah Pervez, Jun Cai, Ahmad Radmanesh, Tyson Burr

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Abstract

A method for determining the presence and location of static shadows and other ambient conditions (such as glare, snow, rain, etc.) in a series of time-successive images is provided. Each image comprises a series of image elements locatable on a plane, with each element being associated with a color defined by three chromatic elements. Furthermore, each image is partitioned into a set of elements, with each element comprising one or more pixels. According to the process of the present method, the ambient conditions are detected using a mixture of processes which utilize the chromatic elements, luminance qualities and temporal characteristics of the series of images.

Claims13

Dependent claims

A method for shadow detection in a series of image frames, the method comprising repeating the following steps:

acquiring a reference frame containing data elements, a current frame of data elements, and a third frame of data elements;
comparing corresponding elements of the current frame and the third frame to detect elements that correspond to motion;
comparing corresponding elements of the current frame and the reference frame, eliminating from comparison elements detected to correspond to motion;
and
using the comparison of corresponding elements of the current frame and the reference frame to create a static shadow map indicating which elements of the current frame correspond to shadows of objects not appearing in the current frame;
in which acquiring the reference frame, the current frame and the third frame is carried out with a digital video camera and the comparing steps are carried out in a computing system.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.