Patent ID: 7583275

Claim:
A method comprising: obtaining a three dimensional model of a three dimensional environment, the three dimensional model generated from range sensor information representing a height field for the three dimensional environment; identifying in real time a region in motion with respect to a background image in real-time video imagery information from at least one image sensor having associated position and orientation information with respect to the three dimensional model, the background image comprising a single distribution background dynamically modeled from a time average of the real-time video imagery information; placing a surface that corresponds to the moving region in the three dimensional model, wherein placing the surface comprises casting a ray from an optical center, corresponding to the real-time video imagery information, to a bottom point of the moving region in an image plane in the three dimensional model, and determining a position, an orientation and a size of the surface based on the ray, a ground plane in the three dimensional model, and the moving region; projecting the real-time video imagery information onto the three dimensional model, including the surface, based on the position and orientation information; and visualizing the three dimensional model with the projected real-time video imagery; wherein identifying a region in motion in real time comprises subtracting the background image from the real-time video imagery information, identifying a foreground object in the subtracted real-time video imagery information, validating the foreground object by correlation matching between identified objects in neighboring image frames, and outputting the validated foreground objects; wherein identifying a foreground object comprises identifying the foreground object in the subtracted real-time video imagery information using a histogram-based threshold and a noise filter.