People-background segmentation with unequal error cost

We address the problem of segmenting a video in two classes of different semantic value, namely background and people, with the goal of guaranteeing that no people (or body parts) are classified as background. Body parts classified as background are given a higher classification error cost (segmentation with bias on background), as opposed to traditional approaches focused on people detection. To generate the people-background segmentation mask, the proposed approach first combines detection confidence maps of body parts and then extends them in order to derive a background mask, which is finally post-processed using morphological operators. Experiments validate the performance of our algorithm in different complex indoor and outdoor scenes with both static and moving cameras.