The need for computer vision-based human detection has increased in fields, such as security, intelligent surveillance and monitoring systems. However, performance enhancement of human detection based on visible light cameras is limited, because of factors, such as nonuniform illumination, shadows and low external light in the evening and night. Consequently, human detection based on thermal (far-infrared light) cameras has been considered as an alternative. However, its performance is influenced by the factors, such as low image resolution, low contrast and the large noises of thermal images. It is also affected by the high temperature of backgrounds during the day. To solve these problems, we propose a new method for detecting human areas in thermal camera images. Compared to previous works, the proposed research is novel in the following four aspects. One background image is generated by median and average filtering. Additional filtering procedures based on maximum gray level, size filtering and region erasing are applied to remove the human areas from the background image. Secondly, candidate human regions in the input image are located by combining the pixel and edge difference images between the input and background images. The thresholds for the difference images are adaptively determined based on the brightness of the generated background image. Noise components are removed by component labeling, a morphological operation and size filtering. Third, detected areas that may have more than two human regions are merged or separated based on the information in the horizontal and vertical histograms of the detected area. This procedure is adaptively operated based on the brightness of the generated background image. Fourth, a further procedure for the separation and removal of the candidate human regions is performed based on the size and ratio of the height to width information of the candidate regions considering the camera viewing direction and perspective projection. Experimental results with two types of databases confirm that the proposed method outperforms other methods.

With the development of intelligent surveillance systems, the need for accurate detection of pedestrians by cameras has increased. However, most of the previous studies use a single camera system, either a visible light or thermal camera, and their performances are affected by various factors such as shadow, illumination change, occlusion, and higher background temperatures. To overcome these problems, we propose a new method of detecting pedestrians using a dual camera system that combines visible light and thermal cameras, which are robust in various outdoor environments such as mornings, afternoons, night and rainy days. Our research is novel, compared to previous works, in the following four ways: First, we implement the dual camera system where the axes of visible light and thermal cameras are parallel in the horizontal direction. We obtain a geometric transform matrix that represents the relationship between these two camera axes. Second, two background images for visible light and thermal cameras are adaptively updated based on the pixel difference between an input thermal and pre-stored thermal background images. Third, by background subtraction of thermal image considering the temperature characteristics of background and size filtering with morphological operation, the candidates from whole image (CWI) in the thermal image is obtained. The positions of CWI (obtained by background subtraction and the procedures of shadow removal, morphological operation, size filtering, and filtering of the ratio of height to width) in the visible light image are projected on those in the thermal image by using the geometric transform matrix, and the searching regions for pedestrians are defined in the thermal image. Fourth, within these searching regions, the candidates from the searching image region (CSI) of pedestrians in the thermal image are detected. The final areas of pedestrians are located by combining the detected positions of the CWI and CSI of the thermal image based on OR operation. Experimental results showed that the average precision and recall of detecting pedestrians are 98.13% and 88.98%, respectively.

Recently, human detection has been used in various applications. Although visible light cameras are usually employed for this purpose, human detection based on visible light cameras has limitations due to darkness, shadows, sunlight, etc. An approach using a thermal (far infrared light) camera has been studied as an alternative for human detection, however, the performance of human detection by thermal cameras is degraded in case of low temperature differences between humans and background. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new method for human detection by using thermal camera images. The main contribution of our research is that the thresholds for creating the binarized difference image between the input and background (reference) images can be adaptively determined based on fuzzy systems by using the information derived from the background image and difference values between background and input image. By using our method, human area can be correctly detected irrespective of the various conditions of input and background (reference) images. For the performance evaluation of the proposed method, experiments were performed with the 15 datasets captured under different weather and light conditions. In addition, the experiments with an open database were also performed. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method can robustly detect human shapes in various environments.