Robust background estimation for complex video sequences

Knowing the background image of a video scene simplifies the general video-object segmentation problem and therefore it is required by several automatic segmentation algorithms. This paper presents a new background estimation algorithm which is applicable to complex video sequences where many objects are simultaneously visible and the background is visible for a short time period only. The algorithm applies a rough segmentation of the input images into foreground and background regions to exclude the foreground objects from background synthesis. This prevents a bias of the synthesized background image towards the color of foreground objects. Experiments show that the obtained background images differ significantly less from the real background than those obtained with previous algorithms.