COROLA: A sequential solution to moving object detection using low-rank approximation

Extracting moving objects from a video sequence and estimating the background of each individual image are fundamental issues in many practical applications such as visual surveillance, intelligent vehicle navigation, and traffic monitoring. Recently, some methods have been proposed to detect moving objects in a video via low-rank approximation and sparse outliers where the background is modeled with the computed low-rank component of the video and the foreground objects are detected as the sparse outliers in the low-rank approximation. Many of these existing methods work in a batch manner, preventing them from being applied in real time and long duration tasks. To address this issue, some online methods have been proposed; however, existing online methods fail to provide satisfactory results under challenging conditions such as dynamic background scene and noisy environments. In this paper, we present an online sequential framework, namely contiguous outliers representation via online low-rank approximation (COROLA), to detect moving objects and learn the background model at the same time. We also show that our model can detect moving objects with a moving camera. Our experimental evaluation uses simulated data and real public datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of COROLA to the existing batch and online methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.