Moving/motionless foreground object detection using fast statistical background updating

Abstract

In video surveillance, the detection of foreground objects in an image sequence from a still camera is very important for object tracking, activity recognition and behaviour understanding. The conventional background subtraction cannot respond promptly to dynamic changes in the background, and temporal difference cannot accurately extract the object shapes and detect motionless objects. In this paper, we propose a fast statistical process control scheme for foreground segmentation. The proposed method can promptly calculate the exact grey-level mean and standard deviation of individual pixels in both short- and long-term image sequences by simply deleting the earliest one among the set of images and adding the current image scene in the image sequence. A short-term updating process can be highly responsive to dynamic changes of the environment, and a long-term updating process can well extract the shape of a moving object. The detection results from both the short- and long-term processes are incorporated to detect motionless objects and eliminate non-stationary background objects. Experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme can be well applied to both indoor and outdoor environments. It can effectively extract foreground objects with various moving speeds or without motion at a high process frame rate.