Spatio-temporal traffic scene modeling for object motion detection

Moving object detection is an important component of a traffic surveillance system. Usual background subtraction approaches often poorly perform on a long outdoor traffic video due to vehicles waiting at an intersection and gradual changes of illumination and background shadow position. We present a fast and robust background subtraction algorithm based on unified spatio-temporal background and foreground modeling. The correlation between neighboring pixels provides high levels of detection accuracy in the dynamic background scene. Our Bayesian fusion method, which establishes the traffic scene model, combines both background and foreground models and considers prior probabilities to adapt changes of background in each frame. We explicitly model both temporal and spatial information based on the kernel density estimation (KDE) formulation for background modeling. Then, we use a Gaussian formulation to describe the spatial correlation of moving objects for foreground modeling. In the updating step, a fusion background frame is generated, and reasonable updating rates are also proposed for the traffic scene. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous work with less computation and is better suited for the traffic scenes.