Approximated Robust Principal Component Analysis for Improved General Scene Background Subtraction

The research reported in this paper addresses the fundamental task of separation of locally moving or deforming image areas from a static or globally moving background. It builds on the latest developments in the field of robust principal component analysis, specifically, the recently reported practical solutions for the long-standing problem of recovering the low-rank and sparse parts of a large matrix made up of the sum of these two components. This article addresses a few critical issues including: embedding global motion parameters in the matrix decomposition model, i.e., estimation of global motion parameters simultaneously with the foreground/background separation task; considering matrix block-sparsity rather than generic matrix sparsity as natural feature in video processing applications; attenuating background ghosting effects when foreground is subtracted; and more critically providing an extremely efficient algorithm to solve the lowrank/sparse matrix decomposition task. The first aspect is important for background/foreground separation in generic video sequences where the background usually obeys global displacements originated by the camera motion in the capturing process. The second aspect exploits the fact that in video processing applications the sparse matrix has a very particular structure, where the non-zero matrix entries are not randomly distributed but they build small blocks within the sparse matrix. The next feature of the proposed approach addresses removal of ghosting effects originated from foreground silhouettes and the lack of information in the occluded background regions of the image. Finally, the proposed model also tackles algorithmic complexity by introducing an extremely efficient “SVD-free” technique that can be applied in most background/foreground separation tasks for conventional video processing.