DeepPBM: Deep Probabilistic Background Model Estimation from Video Sequences

This paper presents a novel unsupervised probabilistic model estimation of visual background in video sequences using a variational autoencoder framework. Due to the redundant nature of the backgrounds in surveillance videos, visual information of the background can be compressed into a low-dimensional subspace in the encoder part of the variational autoencoder, while the highly variant information of its moving foreground gets filtered throughout its encoding-decoding process. Our deep probabilistic background model (DeepPBM) estimation approach is enabled by the power of deep neural networks in learning compressed representations of video frames and reconstructing them back to the original domain. We evaluated the performance of our DeepPBM in background subtraction on 9 surveillance videos from the background model challenge (BMC2012) dataset, and compared that with a standard subspace learning technique, robust principle component analysis (RPCA), which similarly estimates a deterministic low dimensional representation of the background in videos and is widely used for this application. Our method outperforms RPCA on BMC2012 dataset with 23% in average in F-measure score, emphasizing that background subtraction using the trained model can be done in more than 10 times faster.