Improved Background Subtraction-based Moving Vehicle Detection by Optimizing Morphological Operations using Machine Learning

Object detection represents the most important component of Automated Vehicular Surveillance (AVS) systems. Moving vehicle detection based on background subtraction, with fixed morphological parameters, is a popular approach in AVS systems. However, the performance of such an approach deteriorates in the presence of sudden illumination changes in the scene. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method to adjust in real-time the morphological parameters to the illumination changes in the scene. The method is based on machine learning. The features used in the machine learning models are first, second, third and fourth-order statistics of the grayscale images, and the outputs are the appropriate morphological parameters. The resulting background subtraction-based object detection is shown to be robust to illumination changes, and to significantly outperform the conventional approach. Further, artificial neural network (ANN) is shown to provide better performance than Naive Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbours models.