Robust Dynamic Background Modeling for Foreground Estimation

Separating the background and foreground components from video frames is important to many tasks in computer vision and multimedia. As of today, robust principal component analysis (RPCA) has shown highly promising performance with the assumption that the background is low-rank and the foreground is sparse. However, existing RPCA-based methods have overlooked the uncertainty that some parts of the background (e.g., moving leaves in a dynamic background) or even the whole background (e.g., camera jittering) can be moving, which violates the low-rank assumption. To address this issue, we propose a novel enhanced RPCA framework (called ERPCA) by robustly modeling the dynamic background. Different from traditional RPCA framework, the background is decomposed into a low-rank component and a sparse component in the proposed ERPCA framework. Specifically, the sparse parts including foreground and dynamic parts of the background are modeled by Gaussian scale mixture (GSM) model. Moreover, those sparse components are further constrained by temporal consistency using nonzeromeans Gaussian models; the correspondences between sparse pixels in adjacent frames are explored by optical flow. Experimental results on 40 real videos demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, with better average results than current state-of-the-art foreground estimation methods.