Block-Sparse RPCA for Salient Motion Detection

Recent evaluation [2], [13] of representative background subtraction techniques demonstrated that there are still considerable challenges facing these methods. Challenges in realistic environment include illumination change causing complex intensity variation, background motions (trees, waves, etc.) whose magnitude can be greater than those of the foreground, poor image quality under low light, camouflage, etc. Existing methods often handle only part of these challenges; we address all these challenges in a unified framework which makes little specific assumption of the background. We regard the observed image sequence as being made up of the sum of a low-rank background matrix and a sparse outlier matrix and solve the decomposition using the Robust Principal Component Analysis method. Our contribution lies in dynamically estimating the support of the foreground regions via a motion saliency estimation step, so as to impose spatial coherence on these regions. Unlike smoothness constraint such as MRF, our method is able to obtain crisply defined foreground regions, and in general, handles large dynamic background motion much better. Furthermore, we also introduce an image alignment step to handle camera jitter. Extensive experiments on benchmark and additional challenging data sets demonstrate that our method works effectively on a wide range of complex scenarios, resulting in best performance that significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.