Texture collinearity foreground segmentation for night videos

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One of the most difficult scenarios for unsupervised segmentation of moving objects is found in nighttime videos where the main challenges are the poor illumination conditions resulting in low-visibility of objects, very strong lights, surface-reflected light, a great variance of light intensity, sudden illumination changes, hard shadows, camouflaged objects, and noise. This paper proposes a novel method, coined COLBMOG (COLlinearity Boosted MOG), devised specifically for the foreground segmentation in nighttime videos, that shows the ability to overcome some of the limitations of state-of-the-art methods and still perform well in daytime scenarios. It is a texture-based classification method, using local texture modeling, complemented by a color-based classification method. The local texture at the pixel neighborhood is modeled as an N-dimensional vector. For a given pixel, the classification is based on the collinearity between this feature in the input frame and the reference background frame. For this purpose, a multimodal temporal model of the collinearity between texture vectors of background pixels is maintained. COLBMOG was objectively evaluated using the ChangeDetection.net (CDnet) 2014, Night Videos category, benchmark. COLBMOG ranks first among all the unsupervised methods. A detailed analysis of the results revealed the superior performance of the proposed method compared to the best performing state-of-the-art methods in this category, particularly evident in the presence of the most complex situations where all the algorithms tend to fail.