Robust Principal Component Analysis for Background Subtraction: Systematic Evaluation and Comparative Analysis

The analysis and understanding of video sequences is currently quite an active research field. Many applications such as video surveillance, optical motion capture or those of multimedia need to first be able to detect the objects moving in a scene filmed by a static camera. This requires the basic operation that consists of separating the moving objects called "foreground" from the static information called "background". Many background subtraction methods have been developed (Bouwmans et al. (2010); Bouwmans et al. (2008)). A recent survey (Bouwmans (2009)) shows that subspace learning models are well suited for background subtraction. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been used to model the background by significantly reducing the data’s dimension. To perform PCA, different Robust Principal Components Analysis (RPCA) models have been recently developped in the literature. The background sequence is then modeled by a low rank subspace that can gradually change over time, while the moving foreground objects constitute the correlated sparse outliers. However, authors compare their algorithm only with the PCA (Oliver et al. (1999)) or another RPCA model. Furthermore, the evaluation is not made with the datasets and the measures currently used in the field of background subtraction. Considering all of this, we propose to evaluate RPCA models in the field of video-surveillance. Contributions of this chapter can be summarized as follows: