Adaptive contour-based statistical background subtraction method for moving target detection in infrared video sequences

•Adaptive statistical background subtraction model.•Robust detection of non-uniform and variable thermal profile targets likes vehicles.•State of the art performance on a diverse dataset of thermal infrared sequences.•High detection rate with low false alarms.

A robust contour-based statistical background subtraction method for detection of non-uniform thermal targets in infrared imagery is presented. The foremost step of the method comprises of generation of background frame using statistical information of an initial set of frames not containing any targets. The generated background frame is made adaptive by continuously updating the background using the motion information of the scene. The background subtraction method followed by a clutter rejection stage ensure the detection of foreground objects. The next step comprises of detection of contours and distinguishing the target boundaries from the noisy background. This is achieved by using the Canny edge detector that extracts the contours followed by a k-means clustering approach to differentiate the object contour from the background contours. The post processing step comprises of morphological edge linking approach to close any broken contours and finally flood fill is performed to generate the silhouettes of moving targets. This method is validated on infrared video data consisting of a variety of moving targets. Experimental results demonstrate a high detection rate with minimal false alarms establishing the robustness of the proposed method.