A Real-time Small Moving Object Detection System Based on Infrared Images

In this paper a real-time small moving object detection system is realized based on infrared image. The system is composed of a display, a camera and an image acquisition and processing card developed by our research team. An FPGA chip and a DSP chip are embedded in the image card as the major calculation units, which make real-time computation possible. An efficient object detection algorithm is customized for this system, consisting of two stages: the extraction of suspicious objects based on the single frame and the detection of real objects based on the image sequences. The first stage comprises image smoothing and morphological operations which are carried out in the FPGA, while the second stage contains connected component analysis and movement analysis which are implemented in the DSP. In the latter stage, a ring pointer cache structure is designed in order to save memory and speed up the processing, and three integer parameters are used so as to index all the images and objects quickly. In addition, a fast matching algorithm is presented to string the candidate objects in adjacent frames for movement analysis. Finally, two experiments are conducted. Firstly, limited by experimental conditions, a low-quality video taken by a low cost infrared camera is used to test the effectiveness of the algorithm. Secondly, an artificial simulation scenario is built to test the accuracy and real-time performance of the embedded system.