A physically motivated pixel-based model for background subtraction in 3D images

This paper proposes a new pixel-based background subtraction technique, applicable to range images, to detect motion. Our method exploits the physical meaning of depth information, which leads to an improved background/foreground segmentation and the instantaneous suppression of ghosts that would appear on color images. In particular, our technique considers certain characteristics of depth measurements, such as failures for certain pixels or the non-uniformity of the spatial distribution of noise in range images, to build an improved pixel-based background model. Experiments show that incorporating specificities related to depth measurements allows us to propose a method whose performance is increased with respect to other state-of-the-art methods.