Deep background subtraction of thermal and visible imagery for redestrian detection in videos

In this paper, we introduce an efficient framework to subtract the background from both visible and thermal imagery for pedestrians’ detection in the urban scene. We use a deep neural network (DNN) to train the background subtraction model. For the training of the DNN, we first generate an initial background map and then employ randomly 5% video frames, background map, and manually segmented ground truth. Then we apply a cognition-based post-processing to further smooth the foreground detection result. We evaluate our method against our previous work and 11 recently widely cited method on three challenge video series selected from a publicly available color-thermal benchmark dataset OCTBVS. Promising results have been shown that the proposed DNN-based approach can successfully detect the pedestrians with good shape in most scenes regardless of illuminate changes and occlusion problem

Robust Subspace Learning: Robust PCA, Robust Subspace Tracking, and Robust Subspace Recovery

PCA is one of the most widely used dimension reduction techniques. A related easier problem is "subspace learning" or "subspace estimation". Given relatively clean data, both are easily solved via singular value decomposition (SVD). The problem of subspace learning or PCA in the presence of outliers is called robust subspace learning or robust PCA (RPCA). For long data sequences, if one tries to use a single lower dimensional subspace to represent the data, the required subspace dimension may end up being quite large. For such data, a better model is to assume that it lies in a low-dimensional subspace that can change over time, albeit gradually. The problem of tracking such data (and the subspaces) while being robust to outliers is called robust subspace tracking (RST). This article provides a magazine-style overview of the entire field of robust subspace learning and tracking. In particular solutions for three problems are discussed in detail: RPCA via sparse+low-rank matrix decomposition (S+LR), RST via S+LR, and "robust subspace recovery (RSR)". RSR assumes that an entire data vector is either an outlier or an inlier. The S+LR formulation instead assumes that outliers occur on only a few data vector indices and hence are well modeled as sparse corruptions.Comment: To appear, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, July 201

Background Subtraction with Real-time Semantic Segmentation

Accurate and fast foreground object extraction is very important for object tracking and recognition in video surveillance. Although many background subtraction (BGS) methods have been proposed in the recent past, it is still regarded as a tough problem due to the variety of challenging situations that occur in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore this problem from a new perspective and propose a novel background subtraction framework with real-time semantic segmentation (RTSS). Our proposed framework consists of two components, a traditional BGS segmenter $\mathcal{B}$ and a real-time semantic segmenter $\mathcal{S}$. The BGS segmenter $\mathcal{B}$ aims to construct background models and segments foreground objects. The real-time semantic segmenter $\mathcal{S}$ is used to refine the foreground segmentation outputs as feedbacks for improving the model updating accuracy. $\mathcal{B}$ and $\mathcal{S}$ work in parallel on two threads. For each input frame $I_t$, the BGS segmenter $\mathcal{B}$ computes a preliminary foreground/background (FG/BG) mask $B_t$. At the same time, the real-time semantic segmenter $\mathcal{S}$ extracts the object-level semantics ${S}_t$. Then, some specific rules are applied on ${B}_t$ and ${S}_t$ to generate the final detection ${D}_t$. Finally, the refined FG/BG mask ${D}_t$ is fed back to update the background model. Comprehensive experiments evaluated on the CDnet 2014 dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance among all unsupervised background subtraction methods while operating at real-time, and even performs better than some deep learning based supervised algorithms. In addition, our proposed framework is very flexible and has the potential for generalization