We develop a powerful probabilistic framework for the local characterization of surfaces and edges in range images. We use the geometrical nature of the data to derive an analytic expression for the joint probability density function (pdf) for the random variables used to model the ranges of a set of pixels in a local neighborhood of an image. We decompose this joint pdf by considering independently the cases where two real world points corresponding to two neighboring pixels are locally on the same real world surface or not. In particular, we show that this joint pdf is linked to the Voigt pdf and not to the Gaussian pdf as it is assumed in some applications. We apply our framework to edge detection and develop a locally adaptive algorithm that is based on a probabilistic decision rule. We show in an objective evaluation that this new edge detector performs better than prior art edge detectors. This proves the benefits of the probabilistic characterization of the local neighborhood as a tool to improve applications that involve range images.

Human detection in video streams is an important task in many applications including video surveillance. Surprisingly, only few papers have been devoted to this topic. This paper presents a new approach to detect humans in video streams. Our approach is based on the temporal information present in videos. A background subtraction algorithm is first used to segment the silhouettes of the users and the moving objects. Then a classification process in two steps determines for each connected component if it corresponds to the silhouette of a human or not. During the first step, a probabilistic information is computed for each pixel independently. The information from a subset of pixels is then gathered to predict the class of the observed silhouette. This paper presents the principles and some results obtained on real silhouettes. It is shown that our approach is efficient for the detection of humans in video streams.