Robust moving shadow detection with hierarchical mixture of MLP experts

Detection and elimination of the shadows of moving objects in video sequences have been one of the major challenges in tracking applications. Since moving shadows cannot be removed from foreground by motion-based background subtraction methods, they lead to confusion and error in moving object tracking. In this paper, a novel classification method based on hierarchical mixture of experts learning for detecting shadows from foreground is proposed. A hierarchical mixture of MLP experts method (HMME) with semi-supervised teacher-directed learning (SSP-HMME) is used. It contains a two-level mixture of experts (ME) system. The main superiority of this method is that it is more robust than state-of-the-art methods in all types of indoor and outdoor environments. The robustness is against the number of light sources, illumination conditions, surface orientations, object sizes, etc., and it is estimated using accuracy rates. The video set has been collected from 7 different datasets. The results of experiments in outdoor and indoor environments show the validity of the method in the improvement on the accuracy of both detection and discrimination rate for moving shadows in video sequences. The results of the experiments show the accuracy rate of 89 % in average in different indoor and outdoor environmental conditions that is about 6 % better than current state-of-the-art methods.