TensorMoG: A Tensor-Driven Gaussian Mixture Model with Dynamic Scene Adaptation for Background Modelling

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Dec 6;20(23):6973. doi: 10.3390/s20236973.

Abstract

Decades of ongoing research have shown that background modelling is a very powerful technique, which is used in intelligent surveillance systems, in order to extract features of interest, known as foregrounds. In order to work with the dynamic nature of different scenes, many techniques of background modelling adopted the unsupervised approach of Gaussian Mixture Model with an iterative paradigm. Although the technique has had much success, a problem occurs in cases of sudden scene changes with high variation (e.g., illumination changes, camera jittering) that the model unknowingly and unnecessarily takes into account those effects and distorts the results. Therefore, this paper proposes an unsupervised, parallelized, and tensor-based approach that algorithmically works with entropy estimations. These entropy estimations are used in order to assess the uncertainty level of a constructed background, which predicts both the present and future variations from the inputs, thereby opting to use either the incoming frames to update the background or simply discard them. Our experiments suggest that this method is highly integrable into a surveillance system that consists of other functions and can be competitive with state-of-the-art methods in terms of processing speed.

Keywords: Gaussian Mixture Model; background modeling; computer vision; foreground extraction.