Scene background initialization allows the recovery of a clear image without foreground objects from a video sequence, which is generally the first step in many computer vision and video processing applications. The process may be strongly affected by some challenges such as illumination changes, foreground cluttering, intermittent movement, etc. In this paper, a robust background initialization approach based on superpixel motion detection is proposed. Both spatial and temporal characteristics of frames are adopted to effectively eliminate foreground objects. A subsequence with stable illumination condition is first selected for background estimation. Images are segmented into superpixels to preserve spatial texture information and foreground objects are eliminated by superpixel motion filtering process. A low-complexity density-based clustering is then performed to generate reliable background candidates for final background determination. The approach has been evaluated on SBMnet dataset and it achieves a performance superior or comparable to other state-of-the-art works with faster processing speed. Moreover, in those complex and dynamic categories, the algorithm produces the best results showing the robustness against very challenging scenarios.

submitted to Elsevier Signal Processing: Image Communication