An integrated background model for video surveillance based on primal sketch and 3D scene geometry

This paper presents a novel integrated background model for video surveillance. Our model uses a primal sketch representation for image appearance and 3D scene geometry to capture the ground plane and major surfaces in the scene. The primal sketch model divides the background image into three types of regions — flat, sketchable and textured. The three types of regions are modeled respectively by mixture of Gaussians, image primitives and LBP histograms. We calibrate the camera and recover important planes such as ground, horizontal surfaces, walls, stairs in the 3D scene, and use geometric information to predict the sizes and locations of foreground blobs to further reduce false alarms. Compared with the state-of-the-art background modeling methods, our approach is more effective, especially for indoor scenes where shadows, highlights and reflections of moving objects and camera exposure adjusting usually cause problems. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach improves the performance of background/foreground separation at pixel level, and the integrated video surveillance system at the object and trajectory level.