Moving Object Detection in Freely Moving Camera via Global Motion Compensation and Local Spatial Information Fusion

Sensors (Basel). 2024 Apr 30;24(9):2859. doi: 10.3390/s24092859.

Abstract

Motion object detection (MOD) with freely moving cameras is a challenging task in computer vision. To extract moving objects, most studies have focused on the difference in motion features between foreground and background, which works well for dynamic scenes with relatively regular movements and variations. However, abrupt illumination changes and occlusions often occur in real-world scenes, and the camera may also pan, tilt, rotate, and jitter, etc., resulting in local irregular variations and global discontinuities in motion features. Such complex and changing scenes bring great difficulty in detecting moving objects. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new MOD method that effectively leverages local and global visual information for foreground/background segmentation. Specifically, on the global side, to support a wider range of camera motion, the relative inter-frame transformations are optimized to absolute transformations referenced to intermediate frames in a global form after enriching the inter-frame matching pairs. The global transformation is fine-tuned using the spatial transformer network (STN). On the local side, to address the problem of dynamic background scenes, foreground object detection is optimized by utilizing the pixel differences between the current frame and the local background model, as well as the consistency of local spatial variations. Then, the spatial information is combined using optical flow segmentation methods, enhancing the precision of the object information. The experimental results show that our method achieves a detection accuracy improvement of over 1.5% compared with the state-of-the-art methods on the datasets of CDNET2014, FBMS-59, and CBD. It demonstrates significant effectiveness in challenging scenarios such as shadows, abrupt changes in illumination, camera jitter, occlusion, and moving backgrounds.

Keywords: inter-frame transformations; local spatial; motion object detection; optical flow.