Foreground Detection Using an Attention Module and a Video Encoding

Foreground detection is the task of labelling the foreground or background pixels in the video sequence and it depends on the context of the scene. For many years, methods based on background model have been the most used approaches for detecting foreground; however, their methods are sensitive to error propagation from the first background model estimations. To address this problem, we proposed a U-net based architecture with an attention module, where the encoding of the entire video sequence is used as attention context to get features related to the background model. We tested our network on sixteen scenes from the CDnet2014 dataset, with an average F-measure of 88.42. The results also show that our model outperforms traditional and neural networks methods. Thus, we demonstrated that an attention module on a U-net based architecture can deal with the foreground detection challenges.