A Foreground Extraction Algorithm Based on Adaptively

Adjusted Gaussian Mixture Models

AbstractBackground subtraction is a widely used method for moving object detection in computer
vision field. To cope with highly dynamic and complex environments, the mixture of models has been
proposed. In this paper, a background subtraction method is proposed based on the popular Gaussian
Mixture Models technique and a scheme is put forward to adaptively adjust the number of Gaussian
distributions aiming at speeding up execution. Moreover, edge-based image is utilized to weaken the
effect of illumination changes and shadows of moving objects. The final foreground mask is extracted
by the proposed data fusion scheme. Experimental results validate the performance of proposed
algorithm in both computational complexity and segmentation quality.
Keywords-Background subtraction; Gaussian Mixture Model;
Motion detection;
I. INTRODUCTION
The ability to estimate non-stationary temporal distributions efficiently and accurately is a key element
for any robust vision system. Background subtraction is a method typically used to segment moving
regions in video sequences by comparing each new frame to a model of the scene background. It has
been used successfully for indoor and outdoor applications. Generally speaking, there are two types of
background subtraction algorithms: pixel modeling and global modeling. Pixelwise approaches take each
pixel as an output from an independent random process, while global modeling considers the spatial
correlations. One of simple adaptive background differencing technique has become a simplest solution,
since it is sensitive to motion in background and not influenced by the gradual illumination changes,
however, its high sensitivity makes this algorithm come out with a very bad result in complex
background, especially with periodic noise existing. In an actual scene, the complex background such as
snowy or windy conditions, make the conventional algorithm unfit for the real surveillance systems.
Stauffer and Grimson [2,5] modeled each pixel as a mixture of Gaussians and an online EM Algorithm
was proposed by P. KaewTraKulPong et al. [6] to update the model. Even though 3 to 5 Gaussian
distributions are able to model a multi-modal background with difficult situations like shaking branches
of tree, clutter and so forth, there is a fact that this kind of pixel-based background modeling is sensitive
to noise and illumination change. Lots of effort made to modify the model or integrate

III. GMM BASED ADAPTIVELY ADJUSTED MECHANISM
Even though K (3 to 5) Gaussian distributions are capable of modeling a multimodal background, the
number of Gaussian distributions brings a huge computational load for surveillance system. If K equals to
5, it achieves to 320x240x5=384000, with complex computation for learning process of RGB 3 channels
to update weight, mean, and variance, which makes the surveillance system difficult to achieve real time,
let alone the higher resolution for current needs. In fact, not all the pixels of the background change
repetitively. To the pixels where less repetitive motion occurs, such as the areas of ground, houses and
parking lot in the scene of Fig. 1(a), only the first Fig. 1(b) and second Fig. 1(c) highest weighted
Gaussians at each pixel are adequate to model the multi-possibilities for background, and as the Fig.
1(d), (e), (f) show, most of third, fourth and fifth highest weighted Gaussians were much less updated
except the car-passing area where should be foreground area. Based on the analysis above, Adaptively
Adjustment Mechanism was proposed to reduce the number of the Gaussian distributions which offered
less contribution to the multi-possibilities in the process of modeling background. From the analysis and
experiments, different model number can be adopted for different pixels. The update of weight, mean
and variance for our proposal is based on online EM algorithm [6], which allowed fast convergence on a
stable background model for GMM,proposed by P. KaewTraKulPong et al. The main procedure
of the adaptive Elimination Mechanism for GMM is as follows:
E-step: As the online EM algorithm does, we begin our estimating of the Gaussian Mixture Model by
expected sufficient statistics, which is called E-step. Due to the unpredictable factor and possibilities for
the complexity of background pixel, and the first L frames is very important for Gaussian models to
dominant background component and achieve stable adaptations,we keep the number of Gaussians
models, K, for each pixel fixed during E-step. Experiments also show these could provide a good estimate
which helps to improve the accuracy for M-step process. For initialization part,










VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a new background subtraction scheme based on the Gaussian Mixture Models. We
proposed an Adaptively Adjusted Mechanism to reduce less useful Gaussian distributions which
contribute less to background modeling. Through this method, the execution speed for
video is improved. Additionally, an image segmentation based on edge information has been introduced.
By lessening the influence from illumination changes and excluding the shadow of moving object, the
quality of segmentation mask is enhanced consequently. Experimental results validate the gains in both
processing speed and segmentation quality. The proposed algorithm works very well in various complex
background for both outdoor and indoor surveillance system.
Histogram-based Foreground Object Extraction for
Indoor
and Outdoor Scenes
Mandar Kulkarni
_
IPCV Lab, Electrical Engg. Department
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Chennai, India
mandareln40@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Extracting foreground objects is an important task in many video processing/analysis systems. In this
paper, we propose a technique for foreground object extraction, under static camera condition. In our
approach the spatial histogram of a single background image is modeled as Mixture of Gaussians and
this model is updated after every few frames. To extract the foreground, input frames are compared with
current background frame model and foreground pixels are classified according to intensity differences.
To mitigate the errors caused due to movement of the background objects (e.g tree leaves in outdoor
scenes), we also incorporate optical flow in an efficient manner. We demonstrate performance of our
approach on various indoor and outdoor scenes.
Foreground extraction is an important task in many computervision applications. In this paper, we
propose an method which models the histogram of an initial background frame by the mixtures of
Gaussians. Generally, a natural background includes large objects such as trees, road, floor, buildings,
walls etc., each of which contains pixels with similar intensity values, but whose intensities differ
considerably from each other. Hence, the histogram of the background frame containing multiple
objects, is usually multi-modal and can be approximated by the Mixture of Gaussian. The number of
Gaussians is determined by the number of objects present in the background. We also update the
background histogram model at regular intervals to adapt to illumination variations over time. We use
the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to find maximum likelihood parameters of every Gaussian
component. To detect the foreground objects, we compare input frame with the current background
histogram model. Pixels showing higher intensity deviations than background pixels, are classified as
foreground objects. The threshold for foreground classification is computed from the current background
model. We also account for the fact that if a classified foreground object remains stationary for long time,
its corresponding pixels are re-classified as background. To improve the results under significant
background motion, we also incorporate optical flow efficiently in our framework. We provide various
qualitative and quantitative results on indoor and outdoor scenes. An illustration of our approach is
shown in Fig. 1. Note the different intensities of the background objects such as the road, building etc.
These differences show up in the multi-modal histogram (Fig.1 (b)) where blue line indicates histogram
of background frame and red line indicates Gaus sian approximation of the histogram. The foreground
extraction results for the scene are shown in Figs.1 (d,f) for the corresponding frames in Figs.1 (c,e).