A novelty detection approach for foreground region detection in videos with quasi-stationary backgrounds

Detecting regions of interest in video sequences is one of the most important tasks in many high level video processing applications. In this paper a novel approach based on support vector data description is presented, which detects foreground regions in videos with quasi-stationary backgrounds. The main contribution of this paper is the novelty detection approach which automatically segments video frames into background/foreground regions. By using support vector data description for each pixel, the decision boundary for the background class is modeled without the need to statistically model its probability density function. The proposed method is able to achieve very accurate foreground region detection rates even in very low contrast video sequences, and in the presence of quasi-stationary backgrounds. As opposed to many statistical background modeling approaches, the only critical parameter that needs to be adjusted in our method is the number of background training frames.