Detecting moving objects has been well studied in the past due to its importance in computer vision applications. Nevertheless, in aerial imagery, the small sizes of moving objects and the camera motion present challenges to existing well-known detection methods. Most moving object detection methods have reported either high true detection rates associated with high false-detection rates, or low false-detection rates at the expense of lowering true detection rates. This paper proposes a novel method, Kinematic Regularization and Matrix Rank Optimization (KRMARO), to achieve high true-detection rates and reduce false-detection rates significantly. KRMARO introduces a formulation of the moving objects detection problem that integrates a novel kinematic regularization into the principal component pursuit. This formulation models moving objects as sparse, which is located in regions exhibiting unique kinematic properties, while the background is modeled as a low-rank matrix that is corrupted by this sparse. To solve the former formulation accurately, KRMARO proposes a solution based on the inexact Newton method and the inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier with backtracking behavior. The robustness of KRMARO is verified through testing on DARPA VIVID, UCF aerial action, and VIRAT aerial data sets and then comparing the results with relevant state-of-the-art methods.

The detection of ground-moving objects in aerial videos has evolved over the years to handle more challenges such as large camera motion, the small size of the objects, and occlusion. Recently, aerial detection has been attempted using principal component pursuit (PCP) due to its superiority in detecting small moving objects. However, PCP-based detection methods generally suffer from high-false detections as well as high-computational loads. This paper presents a novel PCP-based detection method called kinematic regularization with local null space pursuit (KRLNSP) that drastically reduces false detections and the computational loads. KRLNSP models the background in an aerial video as a subspace that spans a low-dimension subspace while it models the moving objects as moving sparse. Accordingly, the detection is achieved by using multiple local null spaces and enhanced kinematic regularization. The multiple local null spaces allow real-time execution to nullify the background while preserving the moving objects unchanged. The kinematic regularization penalizes these moving objects to filter out false detections. The extensive evaluation of KRLNSP and relevant current state-of-the-art methods prove that the KRLNSP outperforms these methods (the true positive rate of KRLNSP is 98% and its false positive rate is 0.4%) and significantly reduces the computational loads (KRLNSP execution time is 0.3 s/frame).

Aerial imagery applications have gained a great interest especially in the area of comprehensive ground activities analysis. One of the key tasks in such applications is moving objects segmentation. Although many efforts have been presented in the literature that claim high true object detection rates, they still suffer from high false positive rates. This paper focuses on maintaining a high true positive detection rates while significantly reducing the false positive detection rates. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a novel method that integrates matrix recovery concept with physical spring model to drastically reduce false detections. The proposed method segment all candidate moving objects by recovering the low rank matrix, which normally results high false positive detection. To reject false detections, each candidate moving object is modelled as a mass suspended by system of springs, such that the forces of springs attached to false detections is negligible whereas the forces of springs attached to a true moving object will be significant in response to the object motion. The results show that the proposed method, compared to other current state-of-the-art methods, achieved better true positive rates while drastically lowering the false positive rates.

Moving object detection is the first key step for many automated vision analysis applications. One of the major challenges to achieve accurate moving object detection is detecting moving objects in videos captured by moving camera platforms, also called active cameras, where both interest objects and background elements are moving. This paper presents a novel algorithm for moving objects detection from active cameras. The proposed method decomposes a video from an active camera into three components: background, moving objects, and transformation matrix between consecutive frames. The proposed method formulates the problem as a robust principle component analysis (PCA) problem (low rank matrix optimization problem) and solves it using inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier (IALM). In the proposed method, the background represents the low rank matrix, and the moving objects and transformation matrix are treated as added corruption. The robustness of the proposed method is demonstrated using a challenging dataset captured by camera mounted on unmanned air vehicle. The obtained results show that the proposed method achieves best results compared to other current state-of-the-art relevant methods.