Error Bounded Foreground and Background Modeling for Moving Object Detection in Satellite Videos

Detecting moving objects from ground-based videos is commonly achieved by using background subtraction (BS) techniques. Low-rank matrix decomposition inspires a set of state-of-the-art approaches for this task. It is integrated with structured sparsity regularization to achieve BS in the developed method of low-rank and structured sparse decomposition (LSD). However, when this method is applied to satellite videos where spatial resolution is poor and targets' contrast to the background is low, its performance is limited as the data no longer fit adequately either the foreground structure or the background model. In this article, we handle these unexplained data explicitly and address the moving target detection from space as one of the pioneering studies. We propose a new technique by extending the decomposition formulation with bounded errors, named Extended LSD (E-LSD). This formulation integrates low-rank background, structured sparse foreground, as well as their residuals in a matrix decomposition problem. Solving this optimization problem is challenging. We provide an effective solution by introducing an alternative treatment and adopting the direct extension of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed E-LSD was validated on two satellite videos, and the experimental results demonstrate the improvement in background modeling with boosted moving object detection precision over state-of-the-art methods.