Moving camera background-subtraction for obstacle detection on railway tracks

We propose a method for detecting obstacles by comparing input and reference train frontal view camera images. In the field of obstacle detection, most methods employ a machine learning approach, so they can only detect pre-trained classes, such as pedestrian, bicycle, etc. This means that obstacles of unknown classes cannot be detected. To overcome this problem, we propose a background subtraction method that can be applied to moving cameras. First, the proposed method computes frame-by-frame correspondences between the current and the reference (database) image sequences. Then, obstacles are detected by applying image subtraction to corresponding frames. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted an experiment using several image sequences captured on an experimental track. Its results showed that the proposed method could detect various obstacles accurately and effectively.