Moving object extraction using compressed domain features of H.264 INTRA frames

A new efficient algorithm using the compressed domain features of H.264 INTRA frames is proposed for moving object extraction on huge video surveillance archives. To achieve searching efficiency, we propose to locate moving objects by scrutinizing only the INTRA frames in video surveillance archives in H.264 compressed domain with short GOP length. In the proposed structure, a modified codebook algorithm is designed to build the block-based background models from the INTRA coding features. Through the subtraction with the background codebook models, the foreground energy frame is filtered and normalized for detecting the existence of moving objects. To overcome the over-segmentation problem and enable the unsupervised searching, a new structure of hysteresis thresholding, where the thresholds are obtained automatically by an efficient algorithm, is adopted to extract foreground blocks. At the final step, the connected components labeling (CCL) and morphological filters are employed to obtain the list of moving objects. As shown in the experimental results, the proposed algorithm outperforms representative existing works.