Is there any alternative method for morphological operation in OpenCV?

Question

For human detection in video squences, I used opencv to extract the foreground based on edge detection, followed by some postprocessing methods. Then I found that human body is devided into some parts, for instance head and other parts are not connected. For that I used morphological operations to close them up. However, I found it is not too efficient as since I need several morphological operations to fill it for my case. So I am looking for some alternatie approaches. Could someone suggest me? I've searched for papers, and found some, but I don't have enough time to implement a new algorithm now. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The HOG person detector in OpenCV is really simple to implement and performs fairly acceptably when your person is upright, reasonable sized, and fairly unoccluded. It's definitely worth a look if you're just looking for something simple. There's also a GPU implementation available which is pretty quick.

There's example code for the CPU version in the sample peopledetect which comes with OpenCV.

The other traditional approach would be to use a type of Viola-Jones cascade, OpenCV comes with a number of cascades trained for your use, one of which is an upperbody detector, another is a fullbody detector. There's an example of using these in the OpenCV tutorials here.