Fuzzy logic recursive change detection for tracking and denoising of video sequences

Abstract

In this paper we propose a fuzzy logic recursive scheme for motion detection and temporal filtering that can deal with the Gaussian noise and unsteady illumination conditions both in temporal and spatial direction. Our focus is on applications concerning tracking and denoising of image sequences. We process an input noisy sequence with fuzzy logic motion detection in order to determine the degree of motion confidence. The proposed motion detector combines the membership degree appropriately using defined fuzzy rules, where the membership degree of motion for each pixel in a 2D-sliding-window is determined by the proposed membership function. Both fuzzy membership function and fuzzy rules are defined in such a way that the performance of the motion detector is optimized in terms of its robustness to noise and unsteady lighting conditions. We perform simultaneously tracking and recursive adaptive temporal filtering, where the amount of filtering is inversely proportional to the confidence with respect to the existence of motion. Finally, temporally filtered frames are further processed by the proposed spatial filter in order to obtain denoised image sequence. The main contribution of this paper is the robust novel fuzzy recursive scheme for motion detection and temporal filtering. We evaluate the proposed motion detection algorithm using two criteria: robustness to noise and changing illumination conditions and motion blur in temporal recursive denoising. Additionally, we make comparisons in terms of noise reduction with other state of the art video denoising techniques.