Detecting and removing ghosts is an important challenge for moving object detection because ghosts will remain forever once formed, leading to the overall detection performance degradation. To deal with this issue, we first classified the ghosts into two categories according to the way they were formed. Then, the sample-based two-layer background model and histogram similarity of ghost areas were proposed to detect and remove the two types of ghosts, respectively. Furthermore, three important parameters in the two-layer model, i.e., the distance threshold, similarity threshold of local binary similarity pattern (LBSP), and time sub-sampling factor, were automatically determined by the spatial-temporal information of each pixel for adapting to the scene change rapidly. The experimental results on the CDnet 2014 dataset demonstrated that our proposed algorithm not only effectively eliminated ghost areas, but was also superior to the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the overall performance.
Keywords: background subtraction; ghosts; histogram similarity; local binary similarity pattern (LBSP); motion detection; sample-based background model.