Colour Space Effect on Tracking in Video Surveillance

The utilization of video surveillance systems is becoming common and is
expected to more widespread as societies become more complex and the population continues
to grow. The implementation of these video surveillance systems has provided valuable
information and assistance in monitoring large areas. These systems typically use human
operators to determine human behavior and to manually track people or objects of interest over
an array of cameras. With the application of computers with video surveillance, real time
surveillance of large public areas, people and their activities has been made possible for
monitoring and security. The main contribution of this paper is to show the effect of color
space on tracking methods in video surveillance. Results from evaluations on different tracking
methods have indicated that YCbCr and HSV color spaces have better tracking ability
compared to grayscale and RGB color spaces. In addition, the results from evaluations have
also indicated that data from selected layers in some color spaces can be used for the purpose
of tracking namely the Cb and Cr layers from the YCbCr color space and the H layer from the
HSV color space.