Patent ID: 8917934

Claim:
A method for distinguishing foreground objects of interest from a background model, the method comprising: dividing by a programmable device a region of interest of a video data image into a grid array of a plurality of individual cells, wherein each of the cells has a two-dimensional area dimension that is smaller than a two-dimensional area size of a foreground object of interest so that image data of the foreground object in an image data frame spans a contiguous plurality of the cells; initializing each of the cells with a background label; acquiring by the programmable device frame image data for each of the cells; detecting and accumulating by the programmable device energy of edges within each of the cells, and relabeling as foreground each of the cells initialized with the background label that have an accumulated edge energy that meets an edge energy threshold; determining by the programmable device color intensities for each of a plurality of different colors within each cell, and relabeling as foreground each of the cells initialized with the background label that have one of the determined color intensities greater than another of the determined color intensities for that cell by a color intensity differential threshold; and using by the programmable device the frame image data from the cells relabeled as foreground to define a foreground object.