Colour invariant target recognition in multiple camera CCTV surveillance

People tracking in crowded scene have been a popular, and at the same time a very difficult topic in computer vision. It is mainly because of the difficulty for the acquisition of intrinsic signatures of targets from a single view of the scene. Many factors, such as variable illumination conditions and viewing angles, will induce illusive modification of intrinsic signatures of targets. The objective of this paper is to verify if colour constancy (CC) approach really helps people tracking in CCTV network system. We have testified a number of CC algorithms together with various colour descriptors, to assess the efficiencies of people recognitions from multi-camera i-LIDS data set via receiver operation characteristics (ROC). It is found that when CC is applied together with some form of colour restoration mechanisms such as colour transfer, it does improve people recognition by at least a factor of 2. An elementary luminance based CC coupled with a pixel based colour transfer algorithm have been developed and it is reported in this paper.