Optical Flow Based Background Subtraction with a Moving Camera: Application to Autonomous Driving

In this research we present a novel algorithm for background subtraction using a moving camera. Our algorithm is based purely on visual information obtained from a camera mounted on an electric bus, operating in downtown Reno which automatically detects moving objects of interest with the view to provide a fully autonomous vehicle. In our approach we exploit the optical flow vectors generated by the motion of the camera while keeping parameter assumptions a minimum. At first, we estimate the Focus of Expansion, which is used to model and simulate 3D points given the intrinsic parameters of the camera, and perform multiple linear regression to estimate the regression equation parameters and implement on the real data set of every frame to identify moving objects. We validated our algorithm using data taken from a common bus route.