Low complexity maritime surveillance video using background subtraction on H.264

Maritime surveillance video is crucial in monitoring the waters from seaborne threats. Maritime surveillance cameras typically operate by recording the designated areas for long hours, with most of the video storage recording empty sea and sky. Video compression efficiency can be improved by assigning moving objects in video frame as foreground objects and the rest of the frame as background. The background is then compressed at a higher compression ratio to achieve better compression without significant loss of image quality at the region of interest (ROI). This paper presents a method of improving the standard H.264 video coder to improve on compression rate and computation time for maritime surveillance applications.