An efficient coding scheme for surveillance videos captured by stationary cameras

In this paper, a new scheme is presented to improve the coding efficiency of sequences captured by stationary cameras (or namely, static cameras) for video surveillance applications. We introduce two novel kinds of frames (namely background frame and difference frame) for input frames to represent the foreground/background without object detection, tracking or segmentation. The background frame is built using a background modeling procedure and periodically updated while encoding. The difference frame is calculated using the input frame and the background frame. A sequence structure is proposed to generate high quality background frames and efficiently code difference frames without delay, and then surveillance videos can be easily compressed by encoding the background frames and difference frames in a traditional manner. In practice, the H.264/AVC encoder JM 16.0 is employed as a build-in coding module to encode those frames. Experimental results on eight in-door and out-door surveillance videos show that the proposed scheme achieves 0.12 dB~1.53 dB gain in PSNR over the JM 16.0 anchor specially configured for surveillance videos.