A combined approach of Kullback–Leibler divergence and background subtraction for moving object detection in thermal video

In this work, a robust method for moving object detection in thermal video frames has been proposed by including Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) based threshold and background subtraction (BGS) technique. A trimmed-mean based background model has been developed that is capable enough to reduce noise or dynamic component of the background. This work assumed that each pixel has normally distributed. The KLD has computed between background pixel and a current pixel with the help of Gaussian mixture model. The proposed threshold is useful enough to classify the state of each pixel. The post-processing step uses morphological tool for edge linking, and then the flood-fill algorithm has applied for hole-filling, and finally the silhouette of targeted object has generated. The proposed methods run faster and have validated over various real-time based problematic thermal video sequences. In the experimental results, the average value of F1-score, area under the curve, the percentage of correct classification, Matthew’s correlation coefficient show higher values whereas total error and percentage of the wrong classification show minimum values. Moreover, the proposed-1 method achieved higher accuracy and execution speed with minimum false alarm rate that has been compared with proposed-2 as well as considered peer methods in the real-time thermal video.