Identifying Color in Motion in Video Sensors

Identifying or matching the surface color of a moving object in surveillance video is critical for achieving reliable object-tracking and searching. Traditional color models provide little help, since the surface of an object is usually not flat, the object's motion can alter the surface's orientation, and the lighting conditions can vary when the object moves. To tackle this research problem, we conduct extensive data mining on video clips collected under various lighting conditions and distances from several video-cameras. We observe how each of the eleven culture colors can drift in the color space when an object's surface is in motion. In the color space, we then learn the drift pattern of each culture color for classifying unseen surface colors. Finally, we devise a distance function taking color drift into consideration to perform color identification and matching. Empirical studies show our approach to be very promising: achieving over 95% color-prediction accuracy.