A motion region estimation technique for Web camera application

This paper presents the steps involved in processing the output image obtained from image subtraction. A Web camera or Web cam is used as a video clip capture device and MATLAB version 6.01 with Image Processing Toolbox is used as the analysis software. Image frames extracted from the video clips undergo image subtraction for motion detection purposes. The continuous steps presented in this paper are thresholding, noise removal and motion region estimation. Thresholding determines the areas of output images (from subtraction) consisting of pixels with values lying within the threshold value range. Threshold value also indicates the sensitivity of motion to detection. The image still contains a small amount of noise after thresholding. Noise is removed using a median filtering method. Motion region estimation is done by executing an AND or OR operation on two subtracted images from three successive frames. Both the output image from AND and OR operations will estimate the motion region in a different time frame.