Moving object detection in the H.264/AVC compressed domain for video surveillance applications

In this paper a novel method is presented to detect moving objects in H.264/AVC [T. Wiegand, G. Sullivan, G. Bjontegaard, G. Luthra, Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 13 (7) (2003) 560–576] compressed video surveillance sequences. Related work, within the H.264/AVC compressed domain, analyses the motion vector field to find moving objects. However, motion vectors are created from a coding perspective and additional complexity is needed to clean the noisy field. Hence, an alternative approach is presented here, based on the size (in bits) of the blocks and transform coefficients used within the video stream. The system is restricted to the syntax level and achieves high execution speeds, up to 20 times faster than the related work. To show the good detection results, a detailed comparison with related work is presented for different challenging video sequences. Finally, the influence of different encoder settings is investigated to show the robustness of our system.