Unsupervised Moving Object Detection in Complex Scenes Using Adversarial Regularizations

Moving object detection (MOD) is a fundamental step in many high-level vision-based applications, such as human activity analysis, visual object tracking, autonomous vehicles, surveillance, and security. Most of the existing MOD algorithms observe performance degradation in the presence of complex scenes containing camouflage objects, shadows, dynamic backgrounds, and varying illumination conditions, and captured by static cameras. To appropriately handle these challenges, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based on a moving object detection algorithm, called MOD_GAN. In the proposed algorithm, scene-specific GANs are trained in an unsupervised MOD setting, thereby enabling the algorithm to learn generating background sequences using input from uniformly distributed random noise samples. In addition to adversarial loss, during training, norm-based loss in the image space and discriminator feature-space is also minimized between the generated images and the training data. The additional losses enable the generator to learn subtle background details, resulting in a more realistic complex scene generation. During testing, a novel back-propagation based algorithm is used to generate images with statistics similar to the test images. More appropriate random noise samples are searched by directly minimizing the loss function between the test and generated images both in the image and discriminator feature-spaces. The network is not updated in this step; only the input noise samples are iteratively modified to minimize the loss function. Moreover, motion information is used to ensure that this loss is only computed on small-motion pixels. A novel dataset containing outdoor time-lapsed images from dawn to dusk with a full illumination variation cycle is also proposed to better compare the MOD algorithms in outdoor scenes. Accordingly, extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets and comparison with 30 existing methods demonstrate the strength of the proposed algorithm.