International Journal of Recent Advances in Engineering & Technology (IJRAET)

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Survey of Object Detection Approaches in Embedded Platforms

1
M. S. Chelva, 2V. S. Halse
1
Research Scholar, SRTM University, Nanded, Maharashtra, India
2
Karnataka States Women’s University, Vijaypur, Karnataka, India

systems are up to 100 times slower than a modern

Abstract— Computer vision has undergone a lot of
research for standalone embedded systems. The
implementation of image processing algorithms on real
time systems poses new challenges in interfacing the optical
sensors and handling memory constraints. Many of the
work are focused on development of algorithm to detect
object in real time which mainly deal with the separation of
foreground and background object. A major challenge is to
detect the object irrespective of its size, position, and the
illumination. In this paper, we review the various
techniques for object detection proposed by several
authors and suggest a method for object detection in real
time embedded system.
Key Words—Object Detection, Embedded Processor,
Template Matching, Blob Analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
Since the past decade, object detection/tracking is
playing an important role in the area of computer vision.
Object detection/tracking finds its applications in
various areas such as Traffic Surveillance, Medical
Diagnosis, Military Surveillance, Financial transactions,
and Defect detection in Industry etc. This has lead the
computer vision community, object detection as an
active research area [4]. For some application extraction
of moving objects from the video sequence is the
important task. For complicated background, long range
detection and processing of the small moving objects is
an important subject in the area of signal/image
processing [5]. The ultimate aim behind every work is to
develop efficient algorithm/techniques for object
tracking/detection which is one of the major activities in
vision analysis. The detection results are usually very
poor when the detected objects are small and with low
contrast by employing traditional image differencing
methods. Efficiency can be increased in terms of time
and quality using powerful hardware and efficient
algorithm. Any modern computing system can suit well,
providing sufficient performance. Object detection
problem needs to be solved in the harsh environment
with lack of space [3]. To solve such real life
applications industrial computer system has to be
computationally efficient [4]. The system should also be
capable to work in the harsh environment. This need
necessitates a small, energy-efficient, and inexpensive
system rather than the expensive systems. Usually such
desktop computer.
The major challenges in embedded system are memory
limitations, power constrains, ability to execute
algorithm in real time and efficient implementation of
complex mathematical operation.
The paper discusses various techniques for image
segmentation and object detection from the earlier
research work in section II. Section III presents the
popular method to detect object and its analysis. Section
IV, the discussion & conclusion of the paper review.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Detection of small/point targets in infra-red imagery is
an important research area for defence applications. This
requires high sensitivity with low false alarms and high
detection probability. Pre-processing is the necessary
step to detect the target in such scenario. To extract the
complex background pre-processing algorithms are used
[4]. Then the background is subtracted from original
image to get difference image which is then passed to
the detection algorithm. Detection algorithm detects
target and separates background and/or noise from it.
The important aim is to fit the background as closely as
possible in the original image without diminishing the
target signal. There are several pre-processing
algorithms exist like spatial, temporal and
spatiotemporal. For detection of small/point targets an
improved hybrid morphological filter, which provides
high gain in signal-to-noise plus clutter ratio (SCNR) is
used.
The use of median approximation technique to track
single object in a sequence of frames either from a live
camera or a previously saved video. Kalman Filter is
used to detect the object in the image frame [6]. Once
the presence of object is confirmed, the template
matching algorithm is used to track the same. The
templates are dynamically generated for this purpose.
The experiment and results shows that the system is
extremely fast, has robust performance and also
provides a very cost effective solution for tracking
applications.
An image processing based object detection and tracking
technique on embedded platform such as a robot capable

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 International Journal of Recent Advances in Engineering & Technology (IJRAET)
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of tracking an object in real world reported in [18]. The
RTOS is installed on embedded processor that executes
the object detection algorithm. The template matching
approach is used to detect the object in image frame
captured by CMOS camera sensor. ARM processor
helps to meet the real time constraints but the
implementation is limited by the difference in size of
foreground and background object.
One of the work focused on detection and counting of
objects of a predefined type in an image frame using
colour based segmentation and circular Hough transform
[20]. The problem of illumination poses limitation to
this algorithm as the colour of the objects in image
frame is affected. The thresholding based algorithm is a
very basic technique for image segmentation and
separate the foreground [28]. Now, the segmentation
techniques based on colour property of an object [25],
Watershed methodology [26], graph based segmentation
[24][30] and region growing [27][29] are popularly used
to improve the reliability in segmentation process. A
watershed segmentation scheme based on the markers to
provide better segmentation results proposed in [15].
However, there is over-segmentation and poor
efficiency. A rain-falling watershed algorithm to control
the number of catchment basins by setting the drowning
level criteria proposed in[16]. An efficient watershed
segmentation algorithm using the properties of Local
Intensity Minima (LIM) and Morphological Gradient
Direction (MGD) proposed [17]. The watershed
methodology is an efficient technique to perform image
segmentation where the grid lines divide individual
catchment basins in a gradient image. A closed contour
can be generated for each region in image frame [21]. A
classifier based on morphology is used to detect the
object in the area of interest [22]. The expected colour
clusters are correctly identified by this method and
segmentation of colour images is efficiently done by a
Markovian labelling but this complete implementation
requires a lot of memory and time to execute [22]. Some
of the work have presented statistical model based
colour image segmentation algorithm.
Smart cameras are equipped with a high-performance
on-board computing and communication infrastructure,
combining video sensing, processing, and
communications in a single embedded device.
Establishing synchronization among many cameras
provide access to multiple views of an object and thus a
network of embedded cameras can potentially support
more complex and challenging applications - including
smart rooms, surveillance, tracking, and motion analysis
than a single camera. A smart camera is a fully
embedded system, focusing on power consumption, QoS
management, and limited resources is used. The camera
is a scalable, embedded, high-performance,
multiprocessor platform consisting of a network
processor and a variable number of digital signal
processors (DSPs). Using the implemented software
framework, the embedded cameras offer system-level
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services such as dynamic load distribution and task
reconfiguration[11].
Embedded platforms often provide limited resources so
the deployment of advanced computer vision method on
it is very challenging [12]. Smart cameras combine
video sensing, processing, and communication on a
single embedded device which is equipped with a
multiprocessor computation and communication
infrastructure. Multicamera tracking method focuses on
a fully decentralized handover procedure between
adjacent cameras. The basic idea is to initiate a single
tracking instance in the multicamera system for each
object of interest. The tracker follows the supervised
object over the camera network, migrating to the camera
which observes the object. Thus, no central coordination
is required resulting in an autonomous and scalable
tracking approach. The CamShift algorithm is
implemented to track the object in real world; the
handover procedure is realized using a mobile agent
system available on the smart camera network. The
system is successfully tested to track persons at college
campus. The algorithm is described to detect the small
objects in FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) image
sequences [9]. They used the wavelet-based filter to
increase the robustness of their algorithm.
A 2-D adaptive lattice algorithm to improve the image
quality by removing clutter noise is mentioned in a
paper [14], which is computational expensive and hence
not suitable to be used for real-time applications.
Moreover, the detected objects are too small here to find
the complete contour information. Only the rough
regions of targets (called region of interest, ROI) can be
obtained by using the thresholding operation. Hence, it
is necessary to further extract the more exact contour
information from the ROI by using an efficient
segmentation algorithm. The watershed transformation
is a powerful tool for image segmentation where the
watershed lines divide individual catchment basins in a
gradient image.
III. METHODOLOGIES
Viola-Jones algorithm is based on four stages, which
includes Haar Feature Selection, Creating an Integral
Image, Adaboost Training, Cascading Classifier. Viola-
Jones has a very high detection rates which makes it
very robust. Also for practical applications it processes
at least 2 frames per second. It always gives very low
false-positive rate. Viola-Jones is mainly used for face
detection [1]. Table I gives more detailed discussion
about the results.
Feature Based: Method Feature points are used for
object detection by detecting a set of features in a
reference image, extracting feature descriptors, and
matching features between the reference image and an
input. This method of object detection can detect
reference objects despite scale and orientation changes
and is robust to partial conclusions [2].
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The template Matching: Median approximation 1. Noise: Additive Noise 10% and 1% of the pixels have
technique is used to track single object in a sequence of either the maximum or minimum value
frames either from a live camera or a previously saved
2. Small Rotation: Counter-clockwise rotation of 10
video. After object is detected Kalman filter with
degrees
template matching algorithm is used to track the same.
The templates are dynamically generated for this 3. Translation: Translation is done with 2 pixels left and
purpose. According to experiment and results it shows 2 pixels up
that the system is extremely fast, has robust performance
and in a very cost effective system [6]. 4. Small Rotation + Translation: Is combination of Small
Rotation and Translation
Blob Analysis Approach, the Blob detection detects
5. Rotation: Clockwise rotation of 20 degrees
regions in digital image which differ in properties such
as brightness, colour than surrounding. Blob detection Template Matching is done using normalized cross
can be categorised in two different ways one is correlation and Fourier transform + phase correlation.
differential method and other is local maxima. Laplacian Normalized cross correlation is much liked method.
of Gaussian is most common detector. Watershed based Normalized cross correlation:
analogy is also used in some papers for blob detection h w
[3]. i= −h j= −w X i, j T i, j
C u, v =
h w 2 h w 2
Table II, shown results from running three detector. i= −h j= −w X i, j i= −h j= −w T i, j
Detection rates shows that there is improvement in the
detection rate. Also it is seen that false positives rate is X i, j = x u + i, v + i − x
minimum. According to authors suggestions
independent detectors will show more improvement. With

The results shown in table 2 for five different T i, j = t h + i, w + i − t

experiments Noise Small Rotation, Translation, Small Table I. Detection rates for various numbers of false
Rotation + Translation, Rotation. For each experiment positives on the MIT+CMU test set containing 130
there are some changes in figures as, images and 507 [1]

False Detections 10 31 50 65 78 95 167

Detectors
Viola-Jones 76.1% 88.4% 91.4% 92.0% 92.1% 92.9% 93.9%
Viola-Jones(Voting) 81.1% 89.7% 92.1% 93.1% 93.1% 93.2 % 93.7%
Rowley_Baluja-Kanade 83.2% 86.0% - - - 89.2% 90.1%
Schneiderman-Kanade - - - 94.4% - - -
Roth-Yang-Ahuja - - - - 94.8% - -

background noise but if the size of filter is increased, it

Table II. The results of the experiments performed on
becomes impossible to implement the algorithm in real
126 dataset of images using FBR and nearest neighbor
time and hence small size median filter can be used at
classifier[19]
pre-processing stage. The template matching algorithm
Experiments Feature Based Nearest to detect object in image frame has lower time
Recognition Neighbor complexity and also proves to be efficient. It has lower
Correct N.M. Correct N.M. memory requirement and thus is suitable to implement
Noise 100 100 100 100 on embedded system as there are tight memory
Small Rotation 100 100 87 99 constraints. Moreover, the execution time of algorithm is
Translation 100 100 23 52 mainly dependent on resolution of image and hence
Small Rotation choosing a minimum possible image resolution that
100 100 20 43 helps to obtain required result using the chosen
+ Translation
Rotation 74 94 32 70 algorithm is smart strategy for embedded real time
image processing application.
IV. DISCUSION & CONCLUSION
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