Moving shadow detection based on stationary wavelet transform

Many surveillance and forensic applications face problems in identifying shadows and their removal. The moving shadow points overlap with the moving objects in a video sequence leading to misclassification of the exact object. This article presents a novel method for identifying and removing moving shadows using stationary wavelet transform (SWT) based on a threshold determined by wavelet coefficients. The multi-resolution property of the stationary wavelet transform leads to the decomposition of the frames into four different bands without the loss of spatial information. The conventional discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which has the same property, suffers from the problem of shift invariance due to the decimation operation leading to a shift in the original signal during reconstruction. Since SWT does not have the decimation operation, the problem of shift invariance is solved which makes it feasible for change detection, pattern recognition and feature extraction and retrieves the original signal without the loss of phase information also. For detection and removal of shadow, a new threshold in the form of a variant statistical parameter—“skewness”—is proposed. The value of threshold is determined through the wavelet coefficients without the requirement of any supervised learning or manual calibration. Normally, the statistical parameters like mean, variance and standard deviation does not show much variation in complex environments. Skewness shows a unique variation between the shadow and non-shadow pixels in various environments than the previously used thresholds—standard deviation and relative standard deviation. The experimental results prove that the proposed method works better than other state-of-art-methods.