Modeling complex scenes for accurate moving objects segmentation

Abstract

In video surveillance, it is still a difficult task to segment moving object accurately in complex scenes, since most widely used algorithms are background subtraction. We propose an online and unsupervised technique to find optimal segmentation in a Markov Random Field (MRF) framework. To improve the accuracy, color, locality, temporal coherence and spatial consistency are fused together in the framework. The models of color, locality and temporal coherence are learned online from complex scenes. A novel mixture of nonparametric regional model and parametric pixel-wise model is proposed to approximate the background color distribution. The foreground color distribution for every pixel is learned from neighboring pixels of previous frame. The locality distributions of background and foreground are approximated with the nonparametric model. The temporal coherence is modeled with a Markov chain. Experiments on challenging videos demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.