Moving object detection in videos using principal component pursuit and convolutional neural networks

Object recognition in videos is one of the main challenges in computer vision. Several methods have been proposed to achieve this task, such as background subtraction, temporal differencing, optical flow among others. Since the introduction of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for object detection in the Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC), its use for image detection and classification has increased, becoming the state-of-the-art in object detection and classification. In this paper we propose to use Robust PCA (RPCA, a.k.a. Principal Component Pursuit, PCP), as a video background modeling pre-processing step, before using the Faster R-CNN model, in order to improve the overall performance of detection and classification of, specifically, the moving objects. Furthermore, we present extensive computational results that were carried out in three different platforms: A high-end server with a Tesla K40m GPU, a desktop with a Tesla K10m GPU and the embedded system Jetson TK1. Our classification results attain competitive or superior performance (F-measure) with respect to the state-of-the-art, while at the same time, reducing the classification time in all architectures by a factor raging between 4% and 25%.