Online MATLAB Projects: Background Subtraction in MATLAB

Background subtraction, also known as Foreground Detection, is a technique in the fields of image processing and computer vision wherein an image's foreground is extracted for further processing (object recognition etc.). Generally an image's regions of interest are objects (humans, cars, text etc.) in its foreground. After the stage of image preprocessing (which may include image denoising, post processing like morphology etc.) object localisation is required which may make use of this technique. Background subtraction is a widely used approach for detecting moving objects in videos from static cameras. The rationale in the approach is that of detecting the moving objects from the difference between the current frame and a reference frame, often called “background image”, or “background model”. Background subtraction is mostly done if the image in question is a part of a video stream. Background subtraction provides important cues for numerous applications in computer vision, for example surveillance tracking or human poses estimation. However, background subtraction is generally based on a static background hypothesis which is often not applicable in real environments. With indoor scenes, reflections or animated images on screens lead to background changes. In a same way, due to wind, rain or illumination changes brought by weather, static backgrounds methods have difficulties with outdoor scenes.

Background subtraction (BS) is a common and widely used technique for generating a foreground mask (namely, a binary image containing the pixels belonging to moving objects in the scene) by using static cameras.
As the name suggests, BS calculates the foreground mask performing a subtraction between the current frame and a background model, containing the static part of the scene or, more in general, everything that can be considered as background given the characteristics of the observed scene.