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Robust Background Subtraction with Foreground Validation for Urban Traffic Video

Abstract

Identifying moving objects in a video sequence is a fundamental and critical task in many computer-vision applications. Background subtraction techniques are commonly used to separate foreground moving objects from the background. Most background subtraction techniques assume a single rate of adaptation, which is inadequate for complex scenes such as a traffic intersection where objects are moving at different and varying speeds. In this paper, we propose a foreground validation algorithm that first builds a foreground mask using a slow-adapting Kalman filter, and then validates individual foreground pixels by a simple moving object model built using both the foreground and background statistics as well as the frame difference. Ground-truth experiments with urban traffic sequences show that our proposed algorithm significantly improves upon results using only Kalman filter or frame-differencing, and outperforms other techniques based on mixture of Gaussians, median filter, and approximated median filter.

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Correspondence to Sen-Ching S. Cheung.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Cheung, SC.S., Kamath, C. Robust Background Subtraction with Foreground Validation for Urban Traffic Video. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2005, 726261 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.2330

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.2330

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