A measure of motion salience for surveillance applications

A measure of motion salience is proposed for surveillance applications. In this context, salient motion is taken as motion that is likely to result from a typical surveillance target (e.g., a person or vehicle travelling with a sense of direction through a scene) as opposed to other distracting motions (e.g., the scintillation of specularities on water, the oscillation of trees in the wind). The measure that is proposed makes use of spatiotemporal and gradient filters to characterize the extent to which a single coherent motion dominates local regions in space-time. Empirical results show that the measure is capable of making the desired distinctions. The significance of the approach lies in its ability to provide information about motion salience based on relatively simple, early vision operations. Such information can provide vital input to subsequent processing in attempting to distinguish targets of interest from mere distractors.