Morphological Background-Subtraction Modeling for Analyzing Traffic Flow
Erik-Josué Moreno-Mejía, Daniel Cantón-Enriquez, Ana M. Herrera-Navarro, Hugo Jiménez‐Hernández · Modelling—International Open Access Journal of Modelling in Engineering Science · 2025
Automatic surveillance systems have become essential tools for urban centers. These technologies enable intelligent monitoring that is both versatile and non-intrusive. Today, these systems can analyze various aspects, such as urban traffic, citizen behavior, and the detection of unusual activities. Most intelligent systems utilize photo sensors to gather information and assess situations. They analyze data sequences from these photo sensors over time to detect moving objects or other relevant information. In this context, background modeling approaches are crucial for efficiently detecting moving objects by differentiating between the foreground and background, which serves as the basis for further analysis. Although current methods are effective, the dynamic nature of outdoor environments can limit their performance due to numerous external variables that affect the collected information. This paper introduces a novel algorithm that uses mathematical morphology to create a background model by analyzing texture information in discrete spaces, leading to an efficient solution for the background subtraction task. The algorithm dynamically adjusts to global luminance conditions and effectively distinguishes texture information to label the foreground and background using morphological filters. A key advantage of this approach is its use of discrete working spaces, which enables faster implementation on standard hardware, making it suitable for a variety of devices. Finally, our proposal is tested against reference datasets of surveillance and common background subtraction algorithms, demonstrating that our method adapts better to outdoor conditions, making it more robust in detecting different moving objects.