REAL-TIME FOREGROUND SEGMENTATION FOR SURVEILLANCE APPLICATIONS IN NRCS LIDAR SEQUENCES

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a point-level foreground-background separation technique for the segmentation of measurement sequences of a Non-repetitive Circular Scanning (NRCS) Lidar sensor, which is used as a 3D surveillance camera mounted in a fixed position. We show that by applying the NRCS Lidar technology, we can overcome various limitations of rotating multi-beam Lidar sensors, such as low vertical measurement resolution, which is disadvantageous in surveillance applications. As the main challenge, we need to efficiently balance between the spatial and the temporal resolution of the recorded range data. For this reason, we automatically generate and maintain a very high-resolution background model of the sensor’s Field of View, while for enabling real-time analysis of dynamic objects we use low integration time to extract the consecutive time frames. As a result, the laser reflections from foreground objects reflect sparse, but geometrically accurate samples of the silhouettes providing valuable input for higher-level shape description or event analysis steps. We demonstrate the efficiency of the new approach in different realistic NRCS Lidar measurements sequences, obtaining a 0.76 overall F1-score on the measured dataset.