A team of postgraduate students from the University of Macau (UM) won a first prize at the 14th National Postgraduate Mathematic Contest in Modelling. This year’s contest attracted 11,834 teams formed by 35,502 postgraduate students from mainland China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. A team from UM also won a second prize at last year’s contest.
The UM team was formed by PhD student Li Tianjiu, Guo Li, and Feng Qiying. Led by Associate Professor Chen Long from the Department of Computer and Information Science, the team chose to tackle the problem of foreground object extraction based on surveillance videos.
As an integral part of a smart city, vision surveillance systems are widely used in public facilities such as schools, airports, and hospitals. Every day, massive amounts of data are generated by these surveillance systems, which poses a challenging task for analysers. For example, foreground objects like humans are of the greatest interest to analysers; so the ability to extract the foreground objects automatically will be a great benefit. The UM team studied this problem in the contest. By applying the matrix factorisation methods, the team developed a good solution by separating the background and foreground objects in a video. This solution produced excellent results with the test data provided by the contest organiser and won the praise of the judges.
