Fast and accurate extraction of moving object silhouette for personalized Virtual Reality Studio @ Home

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of moving object silhouette in a real-time video is very important for object silhouette extraction in the vision-based interactive systems. However, the inherent problem of moving object segmentation based on the background subtraction criteria is to distinguish the changes occurring from background disturbing effects such as noise, shadows and illumination changes. The present paper proposes a hybrid method based on the background subtraction criteria that preserves the boundary of moving object and also robust against the noise and illumination changes. In the proposed method, the object regions are well identified by fusing the results from the background difference and motion-based change detection criterion. The shadows and highlights are well detected by utilizing the normalized luminance and background difference in Hue and Saturation component. The paper also introduces a novel connected component analysis procedure for detecting the object blob from the noise blobs, and a robust pixel-based background update scheme for updating the dynamic changes in the background. Moreover, the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is analyzed. The proposed method has been implemented and evaluated regarding the segmentation quality and the frame rate. Further, the method has been shown to successfully extract the moving object silhouette and robust against the disturbing effects. Moreover, the proposed method has been tested in the VR @ Home platform.