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Shadows of moving objects often obstruct robust visual tracking. In this paper, we present a car tracker based on a hidden Markov model/Markov random field (HMM/MRF)-based segmentation method that is capable of classifying each small region of an image into three different categories: vehicles, shadows of vehicles, and background from a traffic-monitoring movie. The temporal continuity of the different categories for one small region location is modeled as a single HMM along the time axis, independently of the neighboring regions. In order to incorporate spatial-dependent information among neighboring regions into the tracking process, at the state-estimation stage, the output from the HMMs is regarded as an MRF and the maximum a posteriori criterion is employed in conjunction with the MRF for optimization. At each time step, the state estimation for the image is equivalent to the optimal configuration of the MRF generated through a stochastic relaxation process. Experimental results show that, using this method, foreground (vehicles) and nonforeground regions including the shadows of moving vehicles can be discriminated with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]