Question

I’m attempting to detect motion using frame difference. If there is a motion, I will enter another method, if not, I will not enter that method. The problem is when I make frame difference by using either absdiff(), or bitwise_xor(), I get a noisy frame, that is always detected as a motion.

I tried to remove that noise by using erode() and dilate() methods, it decreases the effect of the noise, but still there is noise. How can I remove this noise ?

Part of my current code:

capture >> Frame; // get a new frame from camera

cvtColor(Frame,Frame1,CV_RGB2GRAY);
threshold(Frame1,Frame1,50,255,CV_THRESH_BINARY);

waitKey(500);
capture >> PreFrame;

cvtColor(PreFrame,PreFrame,CV_RGB2GRAY);
threshold(PreFrame,PreFrame,50,255,CV_THRESH_BINARY);

//Result = Frame1 - PreFrame1;
//absdiff(Frame1,PreFrame1,Result);

bitwise_xor(Frame1,PreFrame,Result);
erode(Result,Result,Mat());
dilate(Result,Result,Mat());

imshow("Result",Result);

if (norm(Result,NORM_L1)==0){
    printf(" no change \n")
}
else
{
    // motion detected
}

Answer 1

What happens if take the absolute difference of your grayscale images, and then threshold the result to remove small intensity changes? This would allow small variations in pixel intensity frame-to-frame, while still triggering your motion detector if there were any significant changes.

For example:

// Obtain image two images in grayscale
cvtColor(Frame,Frame1,CV_RGB2GRAY);
cvtColor(PreFrame,PreFrame,CV_RGB2GRAY);

// Take the absolute difference, this will be zero for identical
// pixels, and larger for greater differences
absdiff(Frame, PreFrame, Result)

// Threshold to remove small differences
threshold(Result,Result,20,255,CV_THRESH_BINARY);

// Prepare output, using Result as a mask
Mat output = Mat::zeros(Frame.size(), Frame.type());
add(
    Frame,   // Add frame
    0,       // and zero
    output,  // to output
    Result   // Only if result is non-zero
);

Do you have any example input/output images you are able to share?