Dense optical flow based background subtraction technique for object segmentation in moving camera environment

Abstract

Segmentation of moving object in video with moving background is a challenging problem and it becomes more difficult with varying illumination. The authors propose a dense optical flow-based background subtraction technique for object segmentation. The proposed technique is fast and reliable for segmentation of moving objects in realistic unconstrained videos. In the proposed work, they stabilise the camera motion by computing homography matrix, then they perform statistical background modelling using single Gaussian background modelling approach. Moving pixels are identified using dense optical flow in the background modelled scenario. The dense optical flow provides motion information of each pixel between consecutive frames, therefore for moving pixel identification they compute motion flow vector of each pixel between consecutive frames. To distinguish between foreground and background pixels, they labelled each pixel and thresholding the magnitude of motion flow vector identifies the moving pixels. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on several realistic videos of different complex conditions. To assess the performance of the proposed work, the authors compared their algorithm with other state-of-art methods and found that the proposed method outperforms the other methods.