Intrusion Detection Using Extraction of Moving Edges *

A.Makarov, J.-M. Vesin and M.Kunt Signal Processing Laboratory Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, CH 1015
Abstract
In this article we present an image processing based method for intrusion detection. The algorithm is characterized by a low computational cost, a high sensitivity to the presence of objects, robustness t o illumination changes and modest memory requirements. The suggested approach is t o separate the moving object edges from the background.

Introduction

Image processing offers the possibility to integrate surveillance of restricted areas and coding (compression and transmission) of frames containing intrusions. The intrusion detection algorithms should satisfy a set of criteria that may seem contradictory:
1. High sensitivity to the presence of intruding objects.

2. Robustness and resilience to slow or fast illumination changes.

3. Independence from the configuration of the background-scene.

4. Conceptual independence from the frame-rate of

the input signal. 5. Speed allowing a reliably frequent checkup. In practical applications, this means that their computational cost should be minimized. Existing algorithms use different principles to approach this problem. The statistical segmentation approach [l]may give good results, but is computationally

Lighting changes are the main cause of false alarms in image based intrusion detection. Edges are much more robust against lighting changes than luminance. An approach based on edge extraction was proposed by Bartolini and Cappellini [3] to design an intrusion detector dealing successfully with variations of light. Robustness of the algorithm is enhanced by selection of reference background contour segments using the Hough Transform. This property is achieved however at the expense of sensitivity, for the method becomes dependent on the location of the reference straight-line edges. The computational and memory costs imposed by the use of the two-dimensional Hough Transform may be critical for low-cost implementations. Our work conserves the edge-extracting approach] but tries to remedy the aforementioned drawbacks. In order to avoid the scene dependence, we base our detection on suppression of background edges and enhancement of moving edges, i.e. edges of the moving object. Beside robustness and sensitivity, the most important criterion to which we submitted was a non-expensive and efficient hardware implementation viability. Our algorithm is presented in full detail in this paper. In section 2 we present the extraction of moving edges. In section 3 we show our results compared to the Hough Transform based method [3]. Finally, the conclusion is given in section 4.

Extraction of Moving Edges

The goal of this algorithm is to extract the edges of

the moving object and to suppress the edges contained

expensive. Methods based on adaptive extraction [2] of background are suitable for keeping track of slow changes of illumination] but their efficiency is impaired in the presence of abrupt changes [3], which often happen in indoor scenes (due to reflections, shadows etc.).
*This work was supported by CERS
grant 2456.1

in the background. The intrusion detection may then be performed by comparing the number of points in the extracted contours with a fixed threshold. As many other change detection algorithms, we simplify the problem by processing images issued from a fixed camera. The current input image is compared with the stored reference. If intrusion is detected, the image is transmitted. If the number of extracted

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other. The resulting bi-level image will consist of the full gradient edges of the moving object (if any), the sparsed remains of the background gradient edges, and of more noise than before. 3. A simple median fiiltering of window size 3x3 is performed in order to conserve the moving edges and to remove the background remains and noise. This is possible because the only dense regions in the binary difference image correspond to the edges of the moving object. 4. The above steps may suffice to detect the intrusion. Anyway, to make sure that the undesirable remains of the background edges and noise are removed, we extract the outline of the median filtered edges. The resulting contour should envelop the moving olbject. The outline points are obtained by taking the first and the last points in each row and each column. These points are then sequentially ordered. If some point or some small group of points is far away from the previous and the succeeding points, it is removed. 5 . In the basic algorithm of Figure 1, the remaining edge-points are counted up and their sum cornpared to a fixed threshold. In [4], it was chosen to detect large increases in the number of edgepoints in order to enhance the robustness when dealing with changing contrasts or very noisy images. Step 2 was used in a recent approach developed independently by Aranda et al. [5].

NO

Figure 1: the block-scheme of the intrusion detector points is below the threshold, the reference image is updated. We shall describe now each individual step of the algorithm of Figure 1.
1. For the sake of simplicity and robustness we do not pay much attention to the precision of kxtracted contours. This allows us to use the fastest way to extract the edges: the gradient. As a matter of fact our edge extraction consists of simple subtraction of consecutive rows and columns, and addition of the absolute values of thus obtained horizontal and vertical components. That is why we called this simplified procedure pseudogradient.

3 Results
Steps 1-5 of the described intrusion detection algorithm are applied to a 64 frame sequence which represents a human being trespassing a watched on area. Dimensions of images are 288x353 pels, luminance range is 0-255. The frame numbers 0 and 64 represent the reference images. The human enters the scene in the first frame and exits in the 63rd frame. Figure 3 shows the number of extracted moving-edge points for each frame. The method we used to test the robustness of the algorithm to illumination changes consists in adding (subtracting) a fixed amount of luminance to (from) each pixel, which gives brightening (darkening) effect [3]. The increment we used to generate brightened and darkened sequence is 50 grey-levels. It is larger than the one suggested in [3], which allowed US to olbserve the behaviour of the algorithm in the presence

Further simplification of gradient images is done as usually by thresholding. We used a low fixed threshold which produced bi-level images containing large (i.e. badly localised) edges and a high amount of noise. If the input image represents the background, the bi-level gradient image is stored in memory as the reference. This reduces the amount of memory needed to store a reference background

2. An AND logical operation is performed on the

current bilevel gradient image and the complement of the reference gradient image input edges. Hence, if an edge-point appears in the reference background image, and not in the current input
image, it will be simply ignored. The backgro-

und edge-points that coincide will annihilate each

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Figure 2: Moving edges detection in normal illumination conditions.

Figure 4: Reference Background Pseudogradient.

Figure 3: The signals extracted from brightened and darkened sequences deviate insignificantly with respect to the moving edge points sum of the original sequence.

Figure 5: Pseudogradient of the current input image.

of saturation due to limited range of luminance. In Figure 3, the number of moving edge-points extracted from brightened and darkened sequences is subtracted and divided by the corresponding number for the original sequence. Due to saturation, some edges disappear, so the obtained values are negative. These variations are very low, hence the algorithm is robust with respect to the applied lighting change model. In all cases, high sensitivity to intrusion is preserved, and the extracted signal is zero when no intruding object occurs. For more complex illumination change models, the change detection method described in [4] is preferred to the comparison with the fixed threshold. Figures 4,5 and 6 represent the bi-level images at different stages of the algorithm. For sake of comparison, we show on Figures 7 , 8 and 9 the results obtained by the reference edges method

0,

Figure 6: Extracted outline.

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Figure 7: Reference edges detection in the original sequence.

Figure 9: Reference edges detection in the brightened sequence. bustness [4]. Addition of new modules turn it into a preprocessor for object recognition or classification applications. The decision about the existence of intrusion was made here by comparin,g the extracted signal with a fixed threshold. This is justified by the fact that no moving edge point is extracted when no intrusion occurs, which holds for the illumination change model we used. In [4],we achieved robustness to various contrasts and high signetl-tcmoise ratios by detecting changes in the extracted signal.

Figure 8: Reference edges detection in the darkened sequence.

References
[l] P.Bouthemy and P.Lalande. Motion detection in a n image sequence using Gibbs distributions. Proceedings ICASSP 89, 3:1651-1654, May 1989.
[2] Klaus-Peter Karmann, Achim von Brandt, and Rainer Gerl. Moving object segmentation based on adaptive reference images. Signal Processing V: Theories and Applications, pages 95:l-954, 1990.
[3]

[3]. Due to the spatial distribution of the reference edges, this method turns out to be less sensitive. Its robustness is impaired by extreme illumination variations. For the tested population of images, our method detected intrusion in 97% of frames versus 49% for the Hough Transform based method.
4

F.Bartollini and V.Caqpellini. Automatic detection of intrusions by image processing. Proceedings of the
International Conference on Digital Signal Processing,
2:468-471,

Conclusion

[4] A. Makarov.

Edge-extraction may be used in intrusion-detection methods in order to enhance their robustness against illumination changes. In this paper we presented an algorithm based on edge-extraction that is characterised by high robustness to illumination changes as well as high sensitivity to the presence of physical objects. Low computational cost and storage requirements are additional assets of this intrusion detector. The method is flexible: if some modules are omitted the detection is simpler and faster at the expense of ro-

July 1993. Change detection using Joint NLOS. Technical Report 94-07, Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 1!>94. [5] C. Le6n J. Aranda and M. Frigola. A multitracking system for trajectory analysis of people in a restricted area. In V. Cappellini, editor, Proceedings of the 4th
International Workshop on Time- Varying Image Processing and Moving Object Recognition, number 3, pitges 118-124, Florence,

Italy, June 10-11 1993. Elsevier

Science B.V., Amsterdam, 1994.

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