Improved Gaussian Mixture Models for Adaptive Foreground Segmentation

Adaptive foreground segmentation is traditionally performed using Stauffer & Grimson’s algorithm that models every pixel of the frame by a mixture of Gaussian distributions with continuously adapted parameters. In this paper we provide an enhancement of the algorithm by adding two important dynamic elements to the baseline algorithm: The learning rate can change across space and time, while the Gaussian distributions can be merged together if they become similar due to their adaptation process. We quantify the importance of our enhancements and the effect of parameter tuning using an annotated outdoors sequence.