Patent ID: 7212650

Claim:
A monitoring system comprising: an image pick-up unit that obtains at least two images of a region where an object to be monitored is present at different timing; a monitoring unit that extracts an image of the monitored object from the images picked-up by the image pick-up unit, determines a state of the monitored object, and transmits the image of the monitored object and the state of the monitored object; and a display unit that receives and displays the image of the monitored object and the state of the monitored object for an observer, the monitoring unit including an outline extracting unit that obtains a difference image from the two images picked up by the image pick-up unit, extracts outlines of non-monitored objects and the monitored object in the difference image to extract images of moving objects in the difference image; an attribute processing unit that calculates areas and barycentric positions of each of the images of the moving objects in the difference image; a fluctuation extracting unit that determines an image of the moving object that may be considered as a moving background image based on the area of the image of the moving object in the difference image and subtracts the image of the moving object that may be considered as the moving background image from the difference image to extract an image of the monitored object without the moving background image; and a determination unit that determines the state of the monitored object based on the barycentric positions and the difference image from the fluctuation extracting unit.