Detecting moving object from dynamic background video sequences via simulating heat conduction

Abstract

Moving object detection is one of the essential tasks for surveillance video analysis. The dynamic background often composed by waving trees, rippling water or fountains, etc. in nature scene greatly interferes with the detection of moving objects in the form of noise. In this paper, a method simulating heat conduction is proposed to extract moving objects from dynamic background video sequences. Based on the visual background extractor (ViBe) with an adaptable distance threshold, we design a temperature field relying on the generated mask image to distinguish between the moving objects and the noise caused by dynamic background. In temperature field, a brighter pixel is associated with more energy. It will transfer a certain amount of energy to its neighboring darker pixels. Through multiple steps of energy transfer the noise regions loss more energy so that they become darker than the detected moving objects. After heat conduction, K-Means algorithm with the customized initial clustering centers is utilized to separate the moving objects from background. We test our method on many videos with dynamic background from public datasets. The results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective for moving object detection from dynamic background sequences.