Region-Based Statistical Background Modeling for Foreground Object Segmentation

This paper proposes a novel region-based scheme for dynamically modeling time-evolving statistics of video background, leading to an effective segmentation of foreground moving objects for a video surveillance system. In (L. Li et al., 2004) statistical-based video surveillance systems employ a Bayes decision rule for classifying foreground and background changes in individual pixels. Although principal feature representations significantly reduce the size of tables of statistics, pixel-wise maintenance remains a challenge due to the computations and memory requirement. The proposed region-based scheme, which is an extension of the above method, replaces pixel-based statistics by region-based statistics through introducing dynamic background region (or pixel) merging and splitting. Simulations have been performed to several outdoor and indoor image sequences, and results have shown a significant reduction of memory requirements for tables of statistics while maintaining relatively good quality in foreground segmented video objects.