IET Intelligent Transport Systems

Research Article

Using GLCM features in Haar wavelet ISSN 1751-956X

Received on 30th April 2018
Revised 13th March 2019
transformed space for moving object Accepted on 15th March 2019
E-First on 5th April 2019
classification doi: 10.1049/iet-its.2018.5192
www.ietdl.org

Nadia Kiaee1, Elham Hashemizadeh2 , Nima Zarrinpanjeh3

1Department of Computer Engineering, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran
2Department of Mathematics, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran
3Department of Civil Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran

E-mail: hashemizadeh@kiau.ac.ir

Abstract: This article proposes an integrated system for segmentation and classification of two moving objects, including car
and pedestrian from their side-view in a video sequence. Based on the use of grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) in Haar
wavelet transformed space, the authors calculated features of texture data from different sub-bands separately. Haar wavelet
transform is chosen because the resulting wavelet sub-bands are strongly affecting on the orientation elements in the GLCM
computation. To evaluate the proposed method, the results of different sub-bands are compared with each other. Extracted
features of objects are classified by using a support vector machine (SVM). Finally, the experimental results showed that use of
three sub-bands of wavelets instead of two sub-bands is more effective and has good precision.

1 Introduction
Automatic image analysis systems for detection, tracking, and
classification of moving objects have been developed within the
different fields of computer vision such as computer conceptual
relations with humans, robotics and medical imaging, smart video
compression, and automatic video analysis [1, 2]. This issue is one
of the most important problems in image processing and machine
vision. Displaying the location of an object, tracking it in the
sequence of video images and classifying objects with high
accuracy has its own specific purpose and can help in the precise
analysis and monitoring of traffic conditions or the retrieval of a
specific object from a video sequence [3–5].
In recent years, many studies have been done for detection and
classification of cars and pedestrians. They often used the features
like Haar wavelet, histograms of oriented gradients, local binary
patterns, and grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). There are
different methods for video surveillance. In [6], Juan and et al.
have classified four moving objects, including pedestrians, cars,
motorcycles, and bicycles by using local shape features and the
histogram of oriented gradients in Haar wavelet transform. These
features improve classification performance and provide smaller
data dimensionality. In [7], Moreno and et al. present a method
based on Histogram to extract features of a specific range of the
moving objects and uses support vector machine (SVM) for
classification in the crowded traffic scene. Kumar and et al. have
classified the flying birds in the sky and the airplane on the runway
by using three methods of feature extraction like Haar wavelet, co-
occurrence matrix based on Haar wavelet and co-occurrence matrix
in [8]. They concluded that co-occurrence matrix based on Haar
wavelet leads to get better results in a short time and increase the
classification accuracy. Papageorgiou and et al. have extracted
modified Haar wavelet features from Haar wavelet transformed
space and provided the results for the vehicle and face detection in
[9]. Triggs and et al. in [10] introduced the histogram features in
Haar wavelet transformed space. In recent years, the histogram
feature is used for detection and classification issues such as
vehicle detection and facial recognition. Various features have their
own power to describe an object. Histogram stored local shape
features of considered objects based on the image direction and
derivatives size. [Local Binary Pattern.] LBP is a texture descriptor
that is computationally efficient, constant in the grey-level
variation and can filter out the noise in multi-scale mode by means
of the same pattern [11].
Wen and et al. in [12] presented a comprehensive system for the
extraction of parked vehicle information, which include vehicle
recognition, localisation, classification, and change detection to
monitor the parking. This system presents a variable vehicle model
to fit the vehicle hypothesis for accurate localisation, and each
parameter is used as target visualisation. In [13], Chandra Mouli
and et al. presented a pedestrian method to overcome complex
background, which is based on SVM and human visual
mechanism. According to human visual attention, first mean and
Laplacian of Gaussian filter are applied to reduce the background
noise but it increases the contrast relation between the foreground
and background. In addition, to remove the remaining noise,
morphological process on filtered image is used. Then, pedestrian
and non-pedestrian are obtained by local threshold segmentation on
processed morphological image. In order to detect pedestrian truly
and reduce the false detection rate, SVM is used.
This paper provides a two-class object detection and
classification system for using in a video sequence with a fixed
camera. The aim of this paper is to improve classification rate for
these two types of moving objects by proposing a new set of
features in this field. The proposed method classified objects by
using GLCM features in Haar wavelet transformed space with
SVM classifier.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2
introduces the segmentation method that is used to detect moving
objects, Section 3 explains the feature extraction process. Section 4
presents classification process. While Section 5 presents the
experimental results of the proposed classification approach.
Section 6 includes the conclusions of this paper.
2 Proposed method
2.1 Background subtraction
Video data which recorded by a surveillance camera are converted
into frames or images. The conventional techniques for extracting
moving objects are background subtraction. In this method, the
moving object is obtained by subtracting the input frame from the
background image. In order to guarantee the motion detection and
achieve better results, we can overcome and reduce the changes
problems of brightness by updating the background image. In this

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Fig. 1  Block diagram of sub-band's feature extraction by applying wavelet
Fig. 2  Haar wavelet transform is applied on an image in the three spectrums
(a) Red, (b) Blue and, (c) Green
case, the exact background image will be created. Several
background estimation algorithms have been proposed. The
background model of our proposed method is implemented by the
Gaussian mixture model [12]. Actually, we have used The
ForegroundDetector function in our Matlab code, which compares
a colour video frame to a background model to determine whether
individual pixels are part of the background or the foreground. It
computes a foreground mask. Then by using background
subtraction, we detect foreground objects in each frame.
ForegroundDetector computes and returns a foreground mask using
the Gaussian mixture model. The parameters that we set to this
function are the NumGaussians to 3 and NumTrainingFrames to
50. NumGaussians is the number of Gaussian mixture model and
the NumTrainingFrames is the number of initial video frames for
training background model.
2.2 Feature extraction
Feature extraction is one of the most important and challenging
issues in image processing. In this process, we extract the features
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that can describe the image and the objects in the image well.
Fig. 1 shows the flowchart of the grey-level co-occurrence matrix–
Wavelet (GLCM-W) feature extraction process. Pre-processing
usually prepares the image for segmentation and handles the
changes in size and brightness of objects in an image. The Haar
wavelet transformation is proposed to improve the
distinguishability of extracted features in two classes of objects. So
first, the first-level Haar wavelet transformation is carried out.
Then, the GLCM features are gained from the area of each object
in each sub-band separately (see Fig. 2) [13, 14].
2.2.1 Pre-processing: To remove the undesirable background
noise and fill the empty space of the foreground mask, opening and
closing of morphological operations are used (Fig. 3).
As the main objective of this paper is moving objects
classification by using the extracted features. Hence, we extract the
features with the information, which obtained from the object.
Although the two-dimensional image after morphological
operations has no appropriate information, but we use it to find the
coordinates of the moving object in the colour frames. Therefore,
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Fig. 3  Effect of morphological operation in removing background noise output
(a), (b) Images which involve noise, (c), (d) Images with noise reduction

Fig. 4  Rectangular window created around the

(a) Car and, (b) Pedestrian

the background and foreground labels refer to the pixels with the
value of zero and one, respectively. After the labelling step, the
maximum and minimum coordinates of the rows and columns pixel
with one value is applied to colour frames. In this case, we find the
position of moving objects in the colour frame by using the
coordinates, which obtained from the two-dimensional frame.
A window rectangle around any detected object is created as
shown in Fig. 4.

2.2.2 Haar wavelet transformed space: Alfred Haar, Hungarian

mathematician in 1909, first proposed the wavelet idea of its
simplest form. The only problem with this wavelet is its
discontinuity and uncertain nature [16, 17]. Haar mother's wavelet
Fig. 5  Decomposition of four sub bands
is defined as follows:

1 apply Haar wavelet transform in three-colour range of red, green,

1 0≤t≤
2
Ψt = 1 (1)
−1 ≤t≤1
2 of 12 images is achieved. While other sub-bands contain more
0 Otherwise
The scaling function Φ t of the Haar wavelet is:
1 0≤t≤1
Φt =
0 otherwise
The scaling function can decompose an image into four sub-
images. (Fig. 5).
Applying wavelet to an image: In discrete wavelet transform,
the signal of an image is decomposed into two sub-sections
through low- and high-pass filters at each step. The low-pass filter
corresponds to the averaging operator, which summarises the
useless information of the signal. The high-pass filter, which also
corresponds to the differential operator, summaries the detailed
signal information. A two-dimensional conversion is the result of
two separate one-dimensional transformations. According to Fig. 6,
the low-pass filter coefficients are stored in the left-hand side of the
matrix and the high-pass filter coefficients are stored at the right-
hand of the matrix. Due to the reduction, the size of the entire
transformed image is the same size as the original image. Then, we
filter the image along the x and y axes and reduce it with two
factors at the end. After applying the filter along x and y axes, the
image is divided into four HH, LH, HL, LL sub-bands [18–20].
2.2.3 GLCM features in the Haar-wavelet transformed
space: In order to achieve further details in the input image, we
and blue spectrums, separately. Each object will pass from two
banks of high-pass and low-pass filters. Thus, each image in each
spectrum decomposed to four sub-bands as shown in Fig. 5. A total
detailed information in a different orientation, LL sub-band
provides an approximate image. Therefore, we ignored LL sub-
band and just used the other sub-bands for feature extraction. In
fact, the low-pass filter corresponds to an averaging operator that
summarises the useless signal information and high-pass filters
corresponds to the difference operator that provides a summary of
the detailed signal information. Since applying wavelet is affected
on the image texture, we use the GLCM to extract features. In this
matrix, as shown in Fig. 7, the events of pixels are checked in a (2,
0) row. After applying wavelet on each spectrum, nine GLCMs are
extracted from three sub-bands separately [21].
The feature vector, which consists of four components, energy,
correlation, contrast, and homogeneity, is computed in each matrix
by Table 1. Then, 36 features of each object stored in the feature
matrix. According to the inappropriate information of LL sub-
band, we do not consider it. Therefore, we extract six GLCMs from
two sub-bands separately, as shown in Fig. 2. In this case, 24
features of each object stored in the feature matrix as shown in
Fig. 1.
2.3 Classification
The purpose of using SVM is to separate feature vectors of a p-
dimension space into a higher p-1 dimensional feature space and
then creating a hyper-plane with maximum margin. SVM decides
based on the hyper-plane with maximum margin. Equation (1) is
defined hyper-plane with maximum margin. X is the input

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variables, W is the coefficients vector, and b is the constant, which
determine the hyper-plane.
W tX + b = 0 (2)
Here, features are energy, homogeneity, conflict, cohesion, and
classes include pedestrian and cars. First, we create the labels
matrix by assigning a label to each row of the features object.
Thus, using cross-validation method, 70% of features matrix are
considered for training and the rest of them as test data. In the test
phase, with the arrival of each new object, SVM predicts by using
the features of input object and their similarity. If the value of
wx + b is belonged to y > 0, it classified as pedestrian and
otherwise as car (Fig. 8). In other words, if there is similarity with
pedestrian features class, the desired object is classified as a
pedestrian and otherwise as cars. There are a total of N training
samples for each class of the pedestrians and cars. Suppose that all
the relevant data points belong to one class. We want to assign the
X input vector to one of −1, +1 classes. Therefore, if the sign of the
function in (1) is positive, we assign +1 to x and otherwise −1 will
assign to X. For training the SVM, the favourite output to train N
samples is ‘1’, which belongs to the pedestrian class and the
favourite output is ‘−1’ for cars. It should be mentioned that the
main subject here is to select features that can help us to improve
our problem solving and we use the Rbf kernel function of second
poly-order. To conclude, the reason for choosing this classifier is
that we had two classes and fortunately, SVM was well-suited to
our problem.

Fig. 6  Original image and apply a two-level wavelet transform

Fig. 7  Calculation of the co-occurrence matrix in row (2,0)

Table 1 GLCM texture statistics defined

Row Features Formula
1 energy ∑ ∑ cij2
i j
2 entropy − ∑ ∑ cijlog2cij
i j
3 contrast ∑ ∑ i − j 2cij
i j
4 homogeneity cij
∑∑ 2
i j 1+ i− j
5 correlation ∑i ∑ j i − μx j − μy
σ xσ y
6 average ∑ ∑ icij
i j

Fig. 8  Flowchart of pedestrian and car classification using Support Vector Machine

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Fig. 9  Collected training samples

Table 2 Evaluation of two and three sub-bands

Proposed method Features number Accuracy Precision Sensitivity Specificity
in three sub-bands 36 0.9875 0.9867 1 0.8333
on two sub-bands 24 0.8125 0.9360 0.8559 0.2778

Fig. 10  Comparison of two and three sub-bands in red, green and blue spectrums. Features number = 12 in three sub-bands and features number = 8 in two
sub-bands

3 Results and discussion
To evaluate the proposed method, the collected data in the field of
urban transport are provided with a fixed camera from their side
view (Fig. 9). Then, a human labels the data so the standard data
are available. The images of car and pedestrian are captured by
Cannon A1400 camera, with 640 × 480 size of each frame and 30
frames in each second of imaging rate. MATLAB programming
environment is introduced for the implementation and testing the
proposed system. This programming language has the ability and
flexibility in working with video and images in various fields such
as image processing and computer vision. The program is run on a
personal computer with Core-i7 processor, 2.2 GHz frequency, and
8 GB Memory. This hardware is not much stronger than what is
used in real applications in intelligent systems. So solving the
problem on this hardware is promising good performance in real
issues.
3.1 Performance of the proposed method in different sub-
bands
Table 2 shows the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity for each of the
three and two sub-bands. Fig. 10 shows comparison of the number
of features and accuracy for each set of extracted features. It
illustrates that by increasing the number of features, which
extracted from different sub-bands, the accuracy of the
classification will increase.
Since the sensitivity of surveillance cameras in different colour
spectrums are different, we have examined the results of extracted
features from each frame by applying a wavelet in red, green, and

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Table 3 Evaluation of two and three sub-bands in three red, green and blue spectrums separately
Proposed method Features numbers Spectrums Accuracy Precision Sensitivity Specificity Recall
three- sub bands 12 red 0.9858 0.9955 1 0.9444 1
12 green 0.9958 0.9955 1 0.9444 1
12 blue 0.9875 0.9867 1 0.8333 1
two-sub bands 8 red 0.9942 0.9942 1 0.9333 1
8 green 0.9917 1 0.9910 1 0.9910
8 blue 0.9917 0.9955 0.9955 0.9944 0.9955

blue separately, as shown in Table 3 [22, 23]. Fig. 10 shows the
results of the extracted features in three colour spectrums in a bar
graph that the blue colour range is leading to decrease the
classification accuracy [24].
4 Conclusion
This paper classifies two types of moving objects using GLCM
features in Haar wavelet transformed space with SVM in intelligent
monitoring systems with fixed cameras. First, according to the
characteristics of wavelet such as de-noising and precise image
retrieval, wavelet has been applied to the area of each object. As
LL sub-band contains noise and other useless information, the
results have been examined by removing this sub-band and using
the two and three sub-bands of the wavelet. Information of texture
image has been computed from GLCM. The GLCM-W feature,
which extracts the GLCM features from the Haar wavelet-
transformed space, shows the advantages of desired classification
performance. The location information of the area of each object is
investigated in three red, green, and blue colour spectrums
separately. It can be concluded that for three sub-bands of wavelet
decomposition in red and green spectrums, the features were more
outstanding instead of determining them in two sub-bands of blue
one. In addition to these, the introduced algorithm is optimised for
applications that the histogram colour variation of each object is
low. It is also recommended to compare the results to other similar
methods as performed in pioneering studies presented in Varma et
al. [24] and Fu et al. [25], which we did not practice in this
research due to our focus on SVM and wavelet. This could be an
interesting field of research for future work.
5 Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this
paper for their careful reading, constructive comments and
suggestions which have improved the paper very much.
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