Real Time Foreground-Background Segmentation Using a Modified Codebook Model

Real time segmentation of scene into objects and background is really important and represents an initial step of object tracking. Starting from the codebook method [4] we propose some modifications which show significant improvements in most of the normal and also difficult conditions. We include parameter of frequency for accessing, deleting, matching and adding codewords in codebook or to move cache codewords into codebook. We also propose an evaluation method in order to objectively compare several segmentation techniques, based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and on precision and recall method. We propose to summarize the quality factor of a method by a single value based on a weighted Euclidean distance or on a harmonic mean between two related characteristics.