We propose a novel pixel-modeling approach for background subtraction using histograms based on strong uniform fuzzy partitions. In the proposed method, the temporal distribution of pixel values is represented by a histogram based on a triangular partition. The threshold for background segmentation is set adaptively according to the shape of the histogram. Histogram accumulation is controlled adaptively by a fuzzy controller under a supervised learning framework. Benefiting from the adaptive scheme, with no parameter tuning, the proposed algorithm functions well across a wide spectrum of challenging environments. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated against more than 20 state-of-the-art methods in complex outdoor environments, particularly in those consisting of highly dynamic backgrounds and camouflaged foregrounds. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method performs effectively in terms of both the true positive rate and the noise suppression ability. Further, it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.

The codebook background subtraction approach is widely used in computer vision applications. One of its distinguished features is the cylinder color model used to cope with illumination changes. The performances of this approach depends strongly on the color model. However, we have found this color model is valid only if the spectrum components of the light source change in the same proportion. In fact, this is not true in many practical cases. In these cases, the performances of the approach would be degraded significantly. To tackle this problem, we propose an arbitrary cylinder color model with a highly efficient updating strategy. This model uses cylinders whose axes need not going through the origin, so that the cylinder color model is extended to much more general cases. Experimental results show that, with no loss of real-time performance, the proposed model reduces the wrong classification rate of the cylinder color model by more than fifty percent.

The fusion of temporal consistency and semantic information with limited foreground information for background segmentation using deep learning is an underinvestigated problem. In this paper, we explore the relation between temporal consistency and semantic information based on the law of total probability. A highly concise framework is proposed to fuse these two types of information. A theoretical proof is given to show that the proposed framework is more accurate than either the temporal consistency-based model or the semantic information-based model and that each model is a special case of the proposed framework. The proposed framework is a white-box framework that can easily be embedded into a deep neural network as a merging layer. In the proposed model, only a few parameters must be learned, which substantially reduces the need for a large dataset. In addition, these interpretable parameters reflect our understanding of the background and can be applied to a wide range of environments. Extensive evaluations indicate the promising performance of the proposed method. Our code and trained weights for the experiments are available at GitHub. ^{1 1}https://github.com/zengzhi2015/SS_TC_BS (We encourage the reader to run the program for a better understanding of the proposed method).

In recent years, with the growing popularity of complex signal approximation via deep neural networks, people have begun to pay close attention to the spectral bias of neural networks—a problem that occurs when a neural network is used to fit broadband signals. An important direction taken to overcome this problem is the use of frequency selection-based fitting techniques, of which the representative work is called the PhaseDNN method, whose core idea is the use of bandpass filters to extract frequency bands with high energy concentration and fit them by different neural networks. Despite the method’s high accuracy, we found in a large number of experiments that the method is less efficient for fitting broadband signals with smooth spectrums. In order to substantially improve its efficiency, a novel candidate—the parallel frequency function-deep neural network (PFF-DNN)—is proposed by utilizing frequency domain analysis of broadband signals and the spectral bias nature of neural networks. A substantial improvement in efficiency was observed in the extensive numerical experiments. Thus, the PFF-DNN method is expected to become an alternative solution for broadband signal fitting.