Speed Up Temporal Median Filter for Background Subtraction

Temporal median filter is one of most popular background subtraction methods. However, median operation is very time-consuming which limits its applications. This paper presents a fast algorithm to reduce the computation time of the temporal median operation. By utilizing the characteristics of high correlation of adjacent frames, the fast algorithm designs a simple mechanism to check whether the median of the current frame is equal to that of the previous frame. The proposed algorithm reduces the computing frequency of median operations significantly, and the experimental results indicate it is much faster than the existing algorithms.