A robust background subtraction method for changing background

Abstract

Background subtraction is a useful and effective method for detecting moving objects in video images. Since this method assumes that image variations are caused only by moving objects (i.e., the background scene is assumed to be stationary), however, its applicability is limited. In this paper, we propose a background subtraction method that robustly handles various changes in the background. The method learns the chronological changes in the observed scene's background in terms of distributions of image vectors. The method operates the subtraction by evaluating the Mahalanobis distances between the averages of such image vectors and newly observed image vectors. The method we propose herein expresses actual changes in the background using a multi-dimensional image vector space. This enables the method to detect objects with the correct sensitivity. We also introduce an eigenspace to reduce the computational cost. We describe herein how approximate Mahalanobis distances are obtained in this eigenspace. In our experiments, we confirmed the proposed method's effectiveness for real world scenes.