Robust Background Subtraction for Network Surveillance in H.264 Streaming Video

The H. 264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is the industry standard in network surveillance offering the lowest bitrate for a given perceptual quality among any MPEG or proprietary codecs. This paper presents a novel approach for background subtraction in bitstreams encoded in the Baseline profile of H.264/AVC. Temporal statistics of the proposed feature vectors, describing macroblock units in each frame, are used to select potential candidates containing moving objects. From the candidate macroblocks, foreground pixels are determined by comparing the colors of corresponding pixels pair-wise with a background model. The basic contribution of the current work compared to the related approaches is that, it allows each macroblock to have a different quantization parameter, in view of the requirements in variable as well as constant bitrate applications. Additionally, a low-complexity technique for color comparison is proposed which enables us to obtain pixel-resolution segmentation at a negligible computational cost as compared to those of classical pixel-based approaches. Results showing striking comparison against those of proven state-of-the-art pixel domain algorithms are presented over a diverse set of standardized surveillance sequences.