Noise-bound method for detecting shadow-free scene changes in image sequences.

Many image processing applications are confounded by both sensor noise and cast shadows. All image sensors add noise to a captured image that can reduce algorithm sensitivity and performance, and global filters or fixed thresholds are often applied to limit their effects. Cast shadows can appear as scene changes and are difficult to adequately detect and remove from images and image sequences. We couple image-noise statistics with a dual-illumination shadow-detection algorithm to provide a novel color-based method for shadow-free scene-change detection whose performance is bound by metamerism and image noise, and has only one variable--the desired confidence interval for noise separation.