Paper:
Motion-Based Template Matching for Obstacle Detection
Kazuhiko Kawamoto*, Naoya Ohnishi**, Atsushi Imiya**,***, Reinhard Klette****, and Kaoru Hirota*
*Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Mail-Box G3-49, 4259 Nagatsuta, Midori-ku, Yokohama 226-8502, Japan
**Institute of Media and Information Technology, Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan
***Software Research Division, National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan
****Centre for Image Technology and Robotics, University of Auckland, Tamaki Campus, Building 731, Auckland, New Zealand
A matching algorithm that evaluates the difference between model and calculated flows for obstacle detection in video sequences is presented. A stabilization method for obstacle detection by median filtering to overcome instability in the computation of optical flow is also presented. Since optical flow is a scene-independent measurement, the proposed algorithm can be applied to various situations, whereas most of existing color- and texture-based algorithms depend on specific scenes, such as roadway and indoor scenes. An experiment is conducted with three real image sequences, in which a static box or a moving toy car appears, to evaluate the performance in terms of accuracy under varying thresholds using a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. For the three image sequences, the ROC curves show, in the best case, that the false positive fraction and the true positive fraction is 19.0% and 79.6%, 11.4% and 84.5%, 19.0% and 85.4%, respectively. The processing time per frame is 19.38msec. on 2.0GHz Pentium 4, which is less than the video-frame rate.