Chapter 8. Video Surveillance, Background Modeling, and Morphological Operations

In this chapter, we are going to learn how to detect a moving object in a video taken from a static camera. This is used extensively in video surveillance systems. We will discuss the different characteristics that can be used to build this system. We will learn about background modeling and see how we can use it to build a model of the background in a live video. Once we do this, we will combine all the blocks to detect the object of interest in the video.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What is naive background subtraction?
• What is frame differencing?
• How do we build a background model?
• How do we identify a new object in a static video?
• What is morphological image processing and how is it related to background modeling?
• How do we achieve different effects using morphological operators?