Background subtraction based on phase and distance transform under sudden illumination change

Effective foreground detection under sudden illumination change is an active research topic. However, most existing background subtraction approaches, which are intensity based, fail to handle this situation. In this paper, we propose a novel background modeling method that overcomes this limitation by relying on statistical models which use pixel phase instead of intensities. We first extract the phase feature of the pixel using Gabor filters. Then, a phase based background subtraction approach is proposed. In this approach, each phase feature is modeled independently by a mixture of Gaussian models and updated with a novel scheme. Since foreground pixels are scattered in the preliminary detection result, distance transform is implemented on the binary image which transforms the image into a distance map. We segment the distance image with a threshold and get the final result. Experiments on two challenging sequences demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.