Unsupervised deep context prediction for background estimation and foreground segmentation

Background estimation is a fundamental step in many high-level vision applications, such as tracking and surveillance. Existing background estimation techniques suffer from performance degradation in the presence of challenges such as dynamic backgrounds, photometric variations, camera jitters, and shadows. To handle these challenges for the purpose of accurate background estimation, we propose a unified method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and image inpainting. The proposed method is based on a context prediction network, which is an unsupervised visual feature learning hybrid GAN model. Context prediction is followed by a semantic inpainting network for texture enhancement. We also propose a solution for arbitrary region inpainting using the center region inpainting method and Poisson blending technique. The proposed algorithm is compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods for background estimation and foreground segmentation and outperforms the compared methods by a significant margin.