Spatio-temporal Background Models for Outdoor Surveillance

Video surveillance in outdoor areas is hampered by consistent background motion which defeats systems that use motion to identify intruders. While algorithms exist for masking out regions with motion, a better approach is to develop a statistical model of the typical dynamic video appearance. This allows the detection of potential intruders even in front of trees and grass waving in the wind, waves across a lake, or cars moving past. In this paper we present a general framework for the identification of anomalies in video, and a comparison of statistical models that characterize the local video dynamics at each pixel neighborhood. A real-time implementation of these algorithms runs on an 800MHz laptop, and we present qualitative results in many application domains.