International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has been issued patent number 8913791, according to news reports. The patent’s inventors are Datta, Feris, and Pankanti, Zhai. This patent was filed on March 28, 2013 and was published online on December 16, 2014. From the background information supplied by the inventors:

"Automated systems use video analytics to process video data to identify and distinguish objects within image data of a scene acquired by a camera or other visual data acquisition device or scanner.

In some examples, systems use background subtraction (BGS) mask processes to distinguish object items as foreground features in the video data, objects that are distinct from a background model of the image data and discernible within video imagery.

Information processing systems receive images or image frame data captured by video cameras or other image capturing devices, wherein individual frames of video data are processed or analyzed by an object detection system in the information processing system to identify, distinguish and track the presence and movement of objects detected within the video data over time.

Some examples use object detectors configured to detect objects having certain attributes distinguishable from other objects, for example using vehicle or pedestrian detectors to recover and distinguish respective vehicle or pedestrian objects in the scene from other moving or stationary objects or scene elements.”