METHOD OF DISTINGUISHING A MOVING OBJECT AND APPARATUS OF TRACKING AND MONITORING A MOVING OBJECT

A moving object recognition method for recognizing a specified moving object in an input image signal in distinction from other objects, and a moving object tracking and monitoring apparatus using the method. One or more moving objects in the input image signal are sequentially detected by the subtraction method, the physical quantities of the detected moving objects are sequentially stored in a memory. Based on this physical quantities, one or more loci of the detected moving objects are determined. A group of physical quantities associated with each locus are stored in a memory as correlated information series of a moving object. Based on the information series thus stored, at least one of a plurality of classification methods is applied to each moving object for determining whether the moving object belongs to the specified moving object or other than the specified moving object. Thus, a detected moving object is recognized as to whether it is a specified moving object or not. A plurality of the classification methods include a method based on the continuity of the locus of a detected moving object, a method based on the smoothness of position change of the detected moving object and a method based on the size of the detected moving object.