Background Subtraction in Video Using Recursive Mixture Models, Spatio-Temporal Filtering and Shadow Removal

We describe our approach to segmenting moving objects from the color video data supplied by a nominally stationary camera. There are two main contributions in our work. The first contribution augments Zivkovic and Heijden’s recursively updated Gaussian mixture model approach, with a multidimensional Gaussian kernel spatio-temporal smoothing transform. We show that this improves the segmentation performance of the original approach, particularly in adverse imaging conditions, such as when there is camera vibration. Our second contribution is to present a comprehensive comparative evaluation of shadow and highlight detection appoaches, which is an essential component of background subtraction in unconstrained outdoor scenes. A comparative evelaution of these approaches over different color-spaces is currently lacking in the literature. We show that both segmentation and shadow removal performs best when we use RGB color spaces.