Moving Object Counting Using a Tripwire in H.265/HEVC Bitstreams for Video Surveillance

The objective of this paper is to estimate the number of moving objects that passes through a specific area without fully decoding the H.265/high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) bitstreams. First, the foreground prediction blocks are extracted according to the motion vectors of the H.265/HEVC bitstreams. Next, these foreground prediction blocks are clustered into the region of interests (ROIs), which are the possible area position of moving objects in the current frame. Finally, the state of moving objects is identified by matching moving objects and these ROIs. In order to estimate the number of moving objects, which move toward a pre-defined direction, a tripwire is set to a detecting area. Any moving objects crossing the tripwire and satisfying the intrusion conditions are counted. With the proposed method, the number of moving objects can be directly estimated in the compressed domain video. This approach significantly increase the processing speed more than 400% at the cost of less than 0.02% accuracy degradation compared with the traditional pixel domain approach. The research results can be applied to traffic management, real-time analysis of surveillance application, and other related areas.