The cement clinker compressive strength (CCCS) at the specified age is a significant indicator of the clinker quality. However, as for the existing CCCS measurement process, the test block must undergo standard curing for a specified age (long waiting time), which is of poor timeliness. Cement production enterprises have long yearned for a new approach to quickly obtain the CCCS values. In this article, a new method for predicting the CCCS with high accuracy immediately using only process information that can be quickly detected is proposed. First, a more efficient feature selection technique is designed to screen out the key input variable group for the CCCS modeling. Then, considering that the traditional single kernel support vector regression (SVR) is difficult to have both good learning and generalization abilities at the same time, the advantages of polynomial kernel function and K-type kernel function are combined to construct hybrid kernel SVR, which serves as the model structures of the 3 days’ CCCS (R3) and 28 days’ CCCS (R28). Finally, an improved grey wolf optimizer algorithm is proposed for the global optimal estimation of CCCS model parameters to further improve the prediction accuracy of the constructed models. The effectiveness of the overall work is verified through various comparative experiments. The experimental results prove that our proposed method can quickly establish accurate estimation models. The optimized SVR can predict the CCCS at specified ages very accurately and timely, which is beneficial for the production of various types of cement in industry.

As a lightweight hardware security primitive, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) can provide reliable identity authentication for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices with limited resources. Arbiter PUF (APUF) is one of the most well-known PUF circuits. However, its hardware implementation has poor reliability on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This paper proposed a highly reliable APUF that uses a delay difference quantization strategy (DDQ-APUF). By adding multiple configurable delay units to the two symmetrical paths of the conventional APUF, the delay difference between the two symmetrical paths of APUF can be obtained by collecting the output of APUF under different delay configurations. Compared to conventional APUFs, DDQ-APUF does not use the arbitration result of signal transmission in two symmetric paths as its response, but rather uses the quantified delay difference between the two paths as its response. A tolerance threshold is adopted in the authentication to accommodate the variations in delay differences due to environmental changes. Moreover, the modeling attack resistance of DDQ-APUF is evaluated, and a strategy for improving this resistance by incorporating pseudo-XOR technique is proposed. The circuit was implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGAs and the experimental results show that the reliability achieves 99.95% with non-CRP-discard.

Simple authentication protocols based on conventional physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are vulnerable to modeling attacks and other security threats. This article proposes an arbiter PUF based on a linear feedback shift register (LFSR-APUF). Different from the previously reported linear feedback shift register (LFSR) for challenge extension, the proposed scheme feeds the external random challenges into the LFSR module to obfuscate the linear mapping relationship between the challenge and response. It can prevent attackers from obtaining valid challenge–response pairs (CRPs), increasing its resistance to modeling attacks significantly. A 64-stage LFSR-APUF has been implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board. The experimental results reveal that the proposed design can effectively resist various modeling attacks, such as logistic regression (LR), evolutionary strategy (ES), artificial neuro network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM) with a prediction rate of 51.79% and a slight effect on the randomness, reliability, and uniqueness. Further, a lightweight authentication protocol is established based on the proposed LFSR-APUF. The protocol incorporates a low-overhead, ultralightweight, novel private bit conversion Cover function that is uniquely bound to each device in the authentication network. The proposed authentication protocol not only resists spoofing attacks, physical attacks, and modeling attacks effectively but also ensures the security of the entire authentication network by transferring important information in encrypted form from the server to the database even when the attacker completely controls the server.

Pavement crack detection is a critical task for insuring road safety. Manual crack detection is extremely time-consuming. Therefore, an automatic road crack detection method is required to boost this progress. However, it remains a challenging task due to the intensity inhomogeneity of cracks and complexity of the background, e.g., the low contrast with surrounding pavements and possible shadows with a similar intensity. Inspired by recent advances of deep learning in computer vision, we propose a novel network architecture, named feature pyramid and hierarchical boosting network (FPHBN), for pavement crack detection. The proposed network integrates context information to low-level features for crack detection in a feature pyramid way, and it balances the contributions of both easy and hard samples to loss by nested sample reweighting in a hierarchical way during training. In addition, we propose a novel measurement for crack detection named average intersection over union (AIU). To demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of the proposed method, we evaluate it on five crack datasets and compare it with the state-of-the-art crack detection, edge detection, and semantic segmentation methods. The extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms these methods in terms of accuracy and generalizability. Code and data can be found in https://github.com/fyangneil/pavement-crack-detection.

Differential features are popularly used in computer vision tasks, such as object detection. In this paper, we revisit these features from a functional approximation perspective. In particular, we view an image as a 2-D functional and investigate its Taylor series approximation. Differential features are derived from the approximation coefficients and, therefore, are naturally collected for appearance representation. Thus motivated, we propose to use the zeroth-, first-, and second-order differential features for pedestrian detection and call such features Taylor feature transform (TAFT). In practice, the TAFT features are computed by discrete sampling to address scale issues and meanwhile achieve computational efficiency. In addition, orientation insensitivity is handled by using directional versions of differentials. When applied to pedestrian detection, the TAFT is sampled on grid pixels and calculated from multiple channels following previous solutions. In our extensive experiments on the INRIA, Caltech, TUD-Brussel, and KITTI data sets, the TAFT achieves state-of-the-art results. It outperforms all handcrafted features and performs on par with many deep-learning solutions. Moreover, when a low false-positive rate is requested, the TAFT generates results that are better than or comparable to the state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods. Meanwhile, our implementation runs at 33 fps for 640×480 images without GPU, making TAFT favorable in many practical scenarios.

Understanding traffic scene images taken from vehicle mounted cameras is important for high-level tasks, such as advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. It is a challenging problem due to large variations under different weather or illumination conditions. In this paper, we tackle the problem of traffic scene understanding from a cross-domain perspective. We attempt to understand the traffic scene from images taken from the same location but under different weather or illumination conditions (e.g., understanding the same traffic scene from images on a rainy night with the help of images taken on a sunny day). To this end, we propose a dense correspondence-based transfer learning (DCTL) approach, which consists of three main steps: 1) extracting deep representations of traffic scene images via a fine-tuned convolutional neural network; 2) constructing compact and effective representations via cross-domain metric learning and subspace alignment for cross-domain retrieval; and 3) transferring the annotations from the retrieved best matching image to the test image based on cross-domain dense correspondences and a probabilistic Markov random field. To verify the effectiveness of our DCTL approach, we conduct extensive experiments on a challenging data set, which contains 1828 images from six weather or illumination conditions.

Image context in image is crucial for improving scene labeling. While the existing methods only exploit local context generated from a small surrounding area of an image patch or a pixel, the long-range and global contextual information is often ignored. To handle this issue, we propose a novel approach for scene labeling by multi-level contextual recurrent neural networks (RNNs). We encode three kinds of contextual cues, viz., local context, global context, and image topic context in structural RNNs to model long-range local and global dependencies in an image. In this way, our method is able to “see” the image in terms of both long-range local and holistic views, and make a more reliable inference for image labeling. Besides, we integrate the proposed contextual RNNs into hierarchical convolutional neural networks, and exploit dependence relationships at multiple levels to provide rich spatial and semantic information. Moreover, we adopt an attention model to effectively merge multiple levels and show that it outperforms average- or max-pooling fusion strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves improved results on the CamVid, KITTI, SiftFlow, Stanford Background, and Cityscapes data sets.

Hierarchical neural networks have been shown to be effective in learning representative image features and recognizing object classes. However, most existing networks combine the low/middle level cues for classification without accounting for any spatial structures. For applications such as understanding a scene, how the visual cues are spatially distributed in an image becomes essential for successful analysis. This paper extends the framework of deep neural networks by accounting for the structural cues in the visual signals. In particular, two kinds of neural networks have been proposed. First, we develop a multitask deep convolutional network, which simultaneously detects the presence of the target and the geometric attributes (location and orientation) of the target with respect to the region of interest. Second, a recurrent neuron layer is adopted for structured visual detection. The recurrent neurons can deal with the spatial distribution of visible cues belonging to an object whose shape or structure is difficult to explicitly define. Both the networks are demonstrated by the practical task of detecting lane boundaries in traffic scenes. The multitask convolutional neural network provides auxiliary geometric information to help the subsequent modeling of the given lane structures. The recurrent neural network automatically detects lane boundaries, including those areas containing no marks, without any explicit prior knowledge or secondary modeling.

In this paper, we propose a novel tracking algorithm based on joint learning hash codes and distance metric. We formulate the visual tracking as an Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) searching process in which hashing methods have achieved promising performances. But most existing hashing methods rely on an affinity or similarity matrix measured by simple Euclidean distance. To obtain more robust hash codes for tracking, we utilize distance metric learning method to measure the similarity. We propose a joint learning hash codes and distance metric algorithm for visual tracking and a fast solution is developed to solve these two problems simultaneously by cross gradient descent. Then we use the learnt hash function to encode the templates and candidates and conduct the ANN searching. Extensive experiments on various challenging sequences show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we propose a vision-based approach for roadside vegetation detection by superpixel matching with local context. Unlike previous detection methods which seek help from additional sensors such as lidar, our algorithm only requires an off-the-shelf camera. The proposed method contains two stages. In the first stage, a superpixel database is constructed by segmenting training images into superpixels, and each superpixel patch is represented with multiple features. After that, the appearance information of vegetation or non-vegetation is encoded in the superpixel database. In the second stage, vegetation detection in each testing image is achieved by superpixel matching. The test image is segmented into superpixels and the (vegetation) label cost of each superpixel is derived by comparing with the k-nearest neighbors in the superpixel database. Furthermore, we incorporate the local context information through the feedback to refine superpixel matching. Taking this context information into account, Markov Random Field (MRF) is utilized to further improve the classification accuracy. Besides, considering the stable layout of road scene images, we utilize spatial priors of road scene to guide vegetation classification. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the promise of our method.

To exploit the reliable prior knowledge that the target object in tracking must be an object other than nonobject, in this letter, we propose to adapt objectness for visual object tracking. Instead of directly applying an existing objectness measure that is generic and handles various objects and environments, we adapt it to be compatible to the specific tracking sequence and object. More specifically, we use the newly proposed binarized normed gradient (BING) objectness as the base, and then train an object-adaptive objectness for each tracking task. The training is implemented by using an adaptive support vector machine that integrates information from the specific tracking target into the BING measure. We emphasize that the benefit of the proposed adaptive objectness, named ADOBING, is generic. To show this, we combine ADOBING with eight top performed trackers in recent evaluations. We run the ADOBING-enhanced trackers along with their base trackers on the CVPR2013 benchmark, and our methods consistently improve the base trackers both in overall performance and under all challenge factors. Noting that the way we integrate objectness in visual tracking is generic and straightforward, we expect even more improvement by using tracker-specific objectness.

In this paper, we propose a novel tracking framework based on discriminative supervised hashing algorithm. Different from previous methods, we treat tracking as a problem of object matching in a binary space. Using the hash functions, all target templates and candidates are mapped into compact binary codes, with which the target matching is conducted effectively. To be specific, we make full use of the label information to assign a compact and discriminative binary code for each sample. And to deal with out-of-sample case, multiple hash functions are trained to describe the learned binary codes, and group sparsity is introduced to the hash projection matrix to select the representative and discriminative features dynamically, which is crucial for the tracker to adapt to target appearance variations. The whole training problem is formulated as an optimization function where the hash codes and hash function are learned jointly. Extensive experiments on various challenging image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed tracker.

Variations in the appearance of a tracked object, such as changes in geometry/photometry, camera viewpoint, illumination, or partial occlusion, pose a major challenge to object tracking. Here, we adopt cognitive psychology principles to design a flexible representation that can adapt to changes in object appearance during tracking. Inspired by the well-known Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model, we propose MUlti-Store Tracker (MUSTer), a dual-component approach consisting of short- and long-term memory stores to process target appearance memories. A powerful and efficient Integrated Correlation Filter (ICF) is employed in the short-term store for short-term tracking. The integrated long-term component, which is based on keypoint matching-tracking and RANSAC estimation, can interact with the long-term memory and provide additional information for output control. MUSTer was extensively evaluated on the CVPR2013 Online Object Tracking Benchmark (OOTB) and ALOV++ datasets. The experimental results demonstrated the superior performance of MUSTer in comparison with other state-of-art trackers.

Reliable long distance obstacle detection and motion planning is a key issue for modern intelligent vehicles, since it can help to make the decision early and design proper driving trajectory to avoid discomfort for the passengers caused by hard brake or sudden large lateral movement. Specifically, when there is vehicle parked on the roadside, we need to detect its position and pass it safely with proper distance without causing much disruption during driving. In this paper, we propose a method to detect roadside parked vehicles robustly and design a trajectory with proper lateral offset from the lane center for the host vehicle to safely pass by it. To successfully detect the roadside parked vehicles, we fuse the output from a long range lidar and radar. We pre-compute multiple path candidates with different lateral offset, and the path planner selects the most proper one based on the distance of the parked vehicle to the lane center. To deal with false alarms and missing detections, we apply temporal filtering to the detection output and history of the decision making. The speed control is carefully designed to ensure that the host vehicle passes the parked vehicle with a safe and comfortable speed. The implemented system was evaluated in numerous scenarios with vehicles parked on the roadside. The results show that the system effectively commands the host vehicle to pass by the parked vehicle safely and comfortably with proper distance and smooth trajectory.

Various sparse-representation-based methods have been proposed to solve tracking problems, and most of them employ least squares (LSs) criteria to learn the sparse representation. In many tracking scenarios, traditional LS-based methods may not perform well owing to the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In this paper, we present a tracking approach using an approximate least absolute deviation (LAD)-based multitask multiview sparse learning method to enjoy robustness of LAD and take advantage of multiple types of visual features, such as intensity, color, and texture. The proposed method is integrated in a particle filter framework, where learning the sparse representation for each view of the single particle is regarded as an individual task. The underlying relationship between tasks across different views and different particles is jointly exploited in a unified robust multitask formulation based on LAD. In addition, to capture the frequently emerging outlier tasks, we decompose the representation matrix to two collaborative components that enable a more robust and accurate approximation. We show that the proposed formulation can be effectively approximated by Nesterov's smoothing method and efficiently solved using the accelerated proximal gradient method. The presented tracker is implemented using four types of features and is tested on numerous synthetic sequences and real-world video sequences, including the CVPR2013 tracking benchmark and ALOV++ data set. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared with several state-of-the-art trackers.

Combining multiple observation views has proven beneficial for tracking. In this paper, we cast tracking as a novel multi-task multi-view sparse learning problem and exploit the cues from multiple views including various types of visual features, such as intensity, color, and edge, where each feature observation can be sparsely represented by a linear combination of atoms from an adaptive feature dictionary. The proposed method is integrated in a particle filter framework where every view in each particle is regarded as an individual task. We jointly consider the underlying relationship between tasks across different views and different particles, and tackle it in a unified robust multi-task formulation. In addition, to capture the frequently emerging outlier tasks, we decompose the representation matrix to two collaborative components which enable a more robust and accurate approximation. We show that the proposed formulation can be efficiently solved using the Accelerated Proximal Gradient method with a small number of closed-form updates. The presented tracker is implemented using four types of features and is tested on numerous benchmark video sequences. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared to several state-of-the-art trackers.

Recently, sparse representation has been applied to visual tracking to find the target with the minimum reconstruction error from a target template subspace. Though effective, these L1 trackers require high computational costs due to numerous calculations for l1 minimization. In addition, the inherent occlusion insensitivity of the l1 minimization has not been fully characterized. In this paper, we propose an efficient L1 tracker, named bounded particle resampling (BPR)-L1 tracker, with a minimum error bound and occlusion detection. First, the minimum error bound is calculated from a linear least squares equation and serves as a guide for particle resampling in a particle filter (PF) framework. Most of the insignificant samples are removed before solving the computationally expensive l1 minimization in a two-step testing. The first step, named τ testing, compares the sample observation likelihood to an ordered set of thresholds to remove insignificant samples without loss of resampling precision. The second step, named max testing, identifies the largest sample probability relative to the target to further remove insignificant samples without altering the tracking result of the current frame. Though sacrificing minimal precision during resampling, max testing achieves significant speed up on top of τ testing. The BPR-L1 technique can also be beneficial to other trackers that have minimum error bounds in a PF framework, especially for trackers based on sparse representations. After the error-bound calculation, BPR-L1 performs occlusion detection by investigating the trivial coefficients in the l1 minimization. These coefficients, by design, contain rich information about image corruptions, including occlusion. Detected occlusions are then used to enhance the template updating. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on three video applications: biometrics (head movement, hand holding object, singers on stage), pedestrians (urban travel, hallway monitoring), and cars in traffic (wide area motion imagery, ground-mounted perspectives). The proposed BPR-L1 method demonstrates an excellent performance as compared with nine state-of-the-art trackers on eleven challenging benchmark sequences.

Recently, sparse representation has been applied to visual tracking to find the target with the minimum reconstruction error from the target template subspace. Though effective, these L1 trackers require high computational costs due to numerous calculations for ℓ1minimization. In addition, the inherent occlusion insensitivity of the ℓ1minimization has not been fully utilized. In this paper, we propose an efficient L1 tracker with minimum error bound and occlusion detection which we call Bounded Particle Resampling (BPR)-L1 tracker. First, the minimum error bound is quickly calculated from a linear least squares equation, and serves as a guide for particle resampling in a particle filter framework. Without loss of precision during resampling, most insignificant samples are removed before solving the computationally expensive ℓ1minimization function. The BPR technique enables us to speed up the L1 tracker without sacrificing accuracy. Second, we perform occlusion detection by investigating the trivial coefficients in the ℓ1minimization. These coefficients, by design, contain rich information about image corruptions including occlusion. Detected occlusions enhance the template updates to effectively reduce the drifting problem. The proposed method shows good performance as compared with several state-of-the-art trackers on challenging benchmark sequences.

Visual tracking plays an important role in many computer vision tasks. A common assumption in previous methods is that the video frames are blur free. In reality, motion blurs are pervasive in the real videos. In this paper we present a novel BLUr-driven Tracker (BLUT) framework for tracking motion-blurred targets. BLUT actively uses the information from blurs without performing debluring. Specifically, we integrate the tracking problem with the motion-from-blur problem under a unified sparse approximation framework. We further use the motion information inferred by blurs to guide the sampling process in the particle filter based tracking. To evaluate our method, we have collected a large number of video sequences with significant motion blurs and compared BLUT with state-of-the-art trackers. Experimental results show that, while many previous methods are sensitive to motion blurs, BLUT can robustly and reliably track severely blurred targets.

In this paper, we propose a robust visual tracking method by casting tracking as a sparse approximation problem in a particle filter framework. In this framework, occlusion, noise, and other challenging issues are addressed seamlessly through a set of trivial templates. Specifically, to find the tracking target in a new frame, each target candidate is sparsely represented in the space spanned by target templates and trivial templates. The sparsity is achieved by solving an l1-regularized least-squares problem. Then, the candidate with the smallest projection error is taken as the tracking target. After that, tracking is continued using a Bayesian state inference framework. Two strategies are used to further improve the tracking performance. First, target templates are dynamically updated to capture appearance changes. Second, nonnegativity constraints are enforced to filter out clutter which negatively resembles tracking targets. We test the proposed approach on numerous sequences involving different types of challenges, including occlusion and variations in illumination, scale, and pose. The proposed approach demonstrates excellent performance in comparison with previously proposed trackers. We also extend the method for simultaneous tracking and recognition by introducing a static template set which stores target images from different classes. The recognition result at each frame is propagated to produce the final result for the whole video. The approach is validated on a vehicle tracking and classification task using outdoor infrared video sequences.

In this paper, we propose using sparse representation for recovering the illumination of a scene from a single image with cast shadows, given the geometry of the scene. The images with cast shadows can be quite complex and, therefore, cannot be well approximated by low-dimensional linear subspaces. However, it can be shown that the set of images produced by a Lambertian scene with cast shadows can be efficiently represented by a sparse set of images generated by directional light sources. We first model an image with cast shadows composed of a diffusive part (without cast shadows) and a residual part that captures cast shadows. Then, we express the problem in an l(1)-regularized least-squares formulation, with nonnegativity constraints (as light has to be non-negative at any point in space). This sparse representation enjoys an effective and fast solution thanks to recent advances in compressive sensing. In experiments on synthetic and real data, our approach performs favorably in comparison with several previously proposed methods.

In this paper we propose a robust visual tracking method by casting tracking as a sparse approximation problem in a particle filter framework. In this framework, occlusion, corruption and other challenging issues are addressed seamlessly through a set of trivial templates. Specifically, to find the tracking target at a new frame, each target candidate is sparsely represented in the space spanned by target templates and trivial templates. The sparsity is achieved by solving an ℓ1-regularized least squares problem. Then the candidate with the smallest projection error is taken as the tracking target. After that, tracking is continued using a Bayesian state inference framework in which a particle filter is used for propagating sample distributions over time. Two additional components further improve the robustness of our approach: 1) the nonnegativity constraints that help filter out clutter that is similar to tracked targets in reversed intensity patterns, and 2) a dynamic template update scheme that keeps track of the most representative templates throughout the tracking procedure. We test the proposed approach on five challenging sequences involving heavy occlusions, drastic illumination changes, and large pose variations. The proposed approach shows excellent performance in comparison with three previously proposed trackers.

Scenes with cast shadows can produce complex sets of images. These images cannot be well approximated by low-dimensional linear subspaces. However, in this paper we show that the set of images produced by a Lambertian scene with cast shadows can be efficiently represented by a sparse set of images generated by directional light sources. We first model an image with cast shadows as composed of a diffusive part (without cast shadows) and a residual part that captures cast shadows. Then, we express the problem in an ℓ1-regularized least squares formulation, with nonnegativity constraints. This sparse representation enjoys an effective and fast solution, thanks to recent advances in compressive sensing. In experiments on both synthetic and real data, our approach performs favorably in comparison to several previously proposed methods.

Tracking moving objects from image sequences obtained by a moving camera is a difficult problem since there exists apparent motion of the static background. It becomes more difficult when the camera motion between the consecutive frames is very large. Traditionally, registration is applied before tracking to compensate for the camera motion using parametric motion models. At the same time, the tracking result highly depends on the performance of registration. This raises problems when there are big moving objects in the scene and the registration algorithm is prone to fail, since the tracker easily drifts away when poor registration results occur. In this paper, we tackle this problem by registering the frames and tracking the moving objects simultaneously within the factorial hidden Markov model framework using particle filters. Under this framework, tracking and registration are not working separately, but mutually benefit each other by interacting. Particles are drawn to provide the candidate geometric transformation parameters and moving object parameters. Background is registered according to the geometric transformation parameters by maximizing a joint gradient function. A state-of-the-art covariance tracker is used to track the moving object. The tracking score is obtained by incorporating both background and foreground information. By using knowledge of the position of the moving objects, we avoid blindly registering the image pairs without taking the moving object regions into account. We apply our algorithm to moving object tracking on numerous image sequences with camera motion and show the robustness and effectiveness of our method.

In this paper, we present a probabilistic algorithm for visual tracking that incorporates robust template matching and incremental sub-space update. There are two template matching methods used in the tracker: one is robust to small perturbation and the other to background clutter. Each method yields a probability of matching. Further, the templates are modeled using mixed probabilities and updated once the templates in the library cannot capture the variation of object appearance. We also model the tracking history using a nonlinear subspace that is described by probabilistic kernel principal components analysis, which provides a third probability. The most-recent tracking result is added to the nonlinear subspace incrementally. This update is performed efficiently by augmenting the kernel Gram matrix with one row and one column. The product of the three probabilities is defined as the observation likelihood used in a particle filter to derive the tracking result. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

We present an approach for vehicle classification in IR video sequences by integrating detection, tracking and recognition. The method has two steps. First, the moving target is automatically detected using a detection algorithm. Next, we perform simultaneous tracking and recognition using an appearance-model based particle filter. The tracking result is evaluated at each frame. Low confidence in tracking performance initiates a new cycle of detection, tracking and classification. We demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method using outdoor IR video sequences

Content-based video retrieval is one of the most active and exciting research areas in the field of multimedia technology. In this paper, we present an approach for video background retrieval using mosaic images and a support vector machine (SVM). The video is captured by a moving camera and a portion of the scene is visible at any time. The Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature tracker is used to get the correspondences between consecutive images and the homography is calculated using these correspondences. We use the homography to construct the mosaic background image and a mixture of Gaussian (MoG) background subtraction algorithm to remove the moving objects in the scene. An SVM is then applied to classify the mosaic background image. The experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.