Communications: electrical – Vehicle position indication – At remote location
Reexamination Certificate
1999-12-21
2001-02-20
Wu, Daniel J. (Department: 2736)
Communications: electrical
Vehicle position indication
At remote location
Reexamination Certificate
active
06191707
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a moving object displaying method which extracts an object which moves in the view of a monitoring camera, etc., from an image which an imaging camera produces and displays it on the display device, a display system which uses the method, and a program recording medium therefor.
Monitoring of video produced by imaging cameras is executed in various places such as roads, railroad crossings, dams and convenience stores. These aim to prevent occurrence of the accidents and the crimes by observing the objects which appear in such specific places. Suspicious-looking persons are monitored, for instance, in convenience stores, and it is monitored whether human beings invade in those areas like the dams where the invasion is absolutely prohibited. It is now general that such monitoring is executed in such a manner that a person watches the video in real time or that the video is recorded on the storage medium like a video tape and is checked afterwards, so the monitoring is time-consuming work. The automation of the video monitoring with a computer is requested from such circumstances. Various methods have been proposed so far.
The article by H. Nakai et al., “Detection of Moving Objects with Three Level Continuous Modules”,
Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
, D-II, Vol. J77-D-II, No. 7, July 1994, pp. 1209-1218 (hereafter, the first reference document,) proposes a method of automatically detecting a moving object like a pedestrian etc. from a video by using the continuous processing module of three steps like detection of change, partial trucking, and movement interpretation. It also reports a result of an experiment to extract moving routes of passengers in a general shop. The article by T. Nakanishi et al., “Automatic Vehicle Image Extraction Based on Spatio-Temporal Image Analysis”,
Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
, D-II, Vol. J77-D-II, No. 9, September 1994, pp. 1716-1726 (hereafter, called the second reference document,) proposes a method of automatically extracting vehicles such as cars which run outdoors, by using the time space image processing. The Japanese laid-open patent application No. 8-221577 or its corresponding U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/601,951, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,721,692, assigned to the present assignee proposes a method of detecting a moving object in outdoors, which sets a slit in an image, calculates correlation of the current image with the image of the background stored beforehand, detects a change in the image, thereby to detect a moving object. Systems are already in the market, which can monitor moving objects in outdoors, for example, a system of automatically recognizing car numbers of running cars.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
In the prior art monitoring system, either the video obtained by the monitoring camera is displayed on the monitoring camera, when the video is acquired, or the image obtained by the monitoring camera is accumulated and the image is checked later on, so the time required of the monitoring of the video is either equal to the acquisition time of the video or is reduced only to the play back time at play back by the fast-forwarding. So, efficiency of the work of the operator of the monitoring camera has not been improved.
The experiment by Nakai et al. extracts the moving routes of passengers in a shop but no explanation is given as to how to associate the extracted routes with the images of passengers who passed through the extracted routes. In addition, the video of inside the shop is recorded on the VTR and the recorded video is used for this extraction. Therefore, this extraction cannot be executed in real time. Moreover, according to the technology adopted by Nakanishi et al., the monitoring target objects are limited to cars etc. which run straightly at a constant velocity. In the technology disclosed in the Japanese laid-open patent application No. 8-221577 or its corresponding U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/601,951, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,721,692, only the movement characteristics is used in order to detect a moving object. So, there is a problem that shaking parts of trees are also detected as part of moving objects. According to the system which is already on the market, it is necessary to execute an operation to exclude an area where there is an image of trees, from the monitoring target area, in order to execute the monitoring in outdoors correctly. So, it is impossible to automatically monitor moving objects in all natural environments. Moreover, the system requires a complex operation to change setting of the operation parameters whenever the monitoring position is changed. Thus, it was necessary to adjust setting of the operation parameters beforehand, in order to detect moving objects correctly in a natural environment which contains roadside trees and miscellaneous trees in the video.
It is the object of the present invention to provide a method of displaying moving objects which can reduce the load required of the operator to check the moving objects in the video, a display system using the method.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method of displaying moving objects which can reduce the above mentioned load required of the operator in various natural environments and a system using the same.
To achieve the above objects, the method of displaying a moving object and the display system according to the present invention execute the following steps:
extracting a moving route of a moving object which enters a predetermined view of an imaging device, based on a moving picture signal provided by the imaging device;
generating first image data indicative of an image of the extracted moving route of the moving object;
generating second image data indicative of an image of the moving object, based on the moving picture signal; and
displaying an overlapped image of the image of the moving object and the image of the moving route extracted for the moving object on a display device.
In a preferable mode of the present invention, the extracting step to the displaying step are repeated for at least one other moving object which enters that view after the moving object. The overlapped image for the first moving object and the overlapped image of the second moving object are displayed adjacent to each other on the display device.
In another preferable mode of the present invention, the image of the moving route of the moving object is displayed in a translucent color in an overlapping manner with the image of the moving object.
In further another preferable mode of the present invention, the image of the moving object is an image supplied by the imaging device, when the moving object is located in a predetermined area.
In further another preferable mode of the present invention, the image of the moving object is a reduced image of the image supplied by the imaging device, when the moving object is located in the predetermined area.
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H. Nakai et al., “Detection of Moving Objects with Three Level Continuous Modules”,Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, D-II, vol. J77-D-II, No. 7, Jul. 1994, pp. 1209-1218 (in Japanese).
T. Nakanishi et al., “Automatic Vehicle Image Extraction Based on Spatio-Temporal Image Analysis”,Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, D-II, vol. J77-D-II, No. 9, Sep. 1994, pp. 1716-1726 (in Japanese).
Fujita Takehiro
Miyatake Takafumi
Nagasaka Akio
Taniguchi Katumi
Antonelli Terry Stout & Kraus LLP
Hitachi , Ltd.
Tweel , Jr. John
Wu Daniel J.
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