Real-time motion detection with candidate masks and region growing for moving cameras

Abstract

A fast and reliable motion detection method is proposed for moving cameras. Existing methods generally build background models and then apply background subtraction for moving pixels detection. In background modeling, statistical methods and/or features, such as edges, local binary patterns are used. Parameters of the proposed methods need to be updated adaptively for better performance. In recent studies, adaptive learning rates are used with main and candidate background models. Simple and adaptive thresholding methods are used for foreground detection in different studies. We build a statistical background model with hue–saturation–value color space and perform background subtraction with the contribution of optical flow vectors. Dense optical flow is applied between warped the background model and the current frame to estimate optical flow vectors. If a pixel has a larger magnitude, we set a weight value for each pixel in the background subtraction process. Then, we extract two candidate foreground masks and apply some postprocessing techniques to determine the final mask. Our proposed method works fast in real time, and the experimental results on two different datasets show that our approach has the highest performance compared with the methods in the literature.