Modeling pixel process with scale invariant local patterns for background subtraction in complex scenes

Background modeling plays an important role in video surveillance, yet in complex scenes it is still a challenging problem. Among many difficulties, problems caused by illumination variations and dynamic backgrounds are the key aspects. In this work, we develop an efficient background subtraction framework to tackle these problems. First, we propose a scale invariant local ternary pattern operator, and show that it is effective for handling illumination variations, especially for moving soft shadows. Second, we propose a pattern kernel density estimation technique to effectively model the probability distribution of local patterns in the pixel process, which utilizes only one single LBP-like pattern instead of histogram as feature. Third, we develop multimodal background models with the above techniques and a multiscale fusion scheme for handling complex dynamic backgrounds. Exhaustive experimental evaluations on complex scenes show that the proposed method is fast and effective, achieving more than 10% improvement in accuracy compared over existing state-of-the-art algorithms.