In order to detect anomolous movement, successive images are inspected and objects are tracked to determine normal paths of movement. Tracking is by means of tracking at least one point feature. Subsequently an object is tracked in a current sequence of images, and its path is compared to the range of normal paths. If its path falls outside the range of normal paths, an alarm is raised. The Video Motion Anomaly Detector addresses the problem of automatically detecting events of interest to operators of CCTV systems used in security, transport and other applications, processing CCTV images. The detector may be used in a number of ways, for example to raise an alarm, summoning a human operator to view video data, or to trigger selective recording of video data or to insert an index mark in recordings of video data.
Video motion anomaly detector