A novel approach for object extraction from video sequences based on continuous background/foreground classification

In many computer vision related applications it is necessary to distinguish between the background of an image and the objects that are contained in it. This is a difficult problem because of the constraints imposed by the available time and the computational cost of robust object extraction algorithms. This report describes a new method that benefits from state of the art background/foreground classification combined with the strong theoretical foundations of clustering. The pixels on the scene background are modeled as Mixtures of Gaussians and the output of the classification process are continuous values representing the likelihood that each pixel belongs to the foreground. The clustering is based on a Self Organizing Network (SON) which has a robust initialization schema and is able to find the number of objects in an image or grid. The algorithm's complexity is linear with respect to the number of pixels or cells.