This paper proposes an application of compressive imaging systems to the problem of wide-area video surveillance systems. A parallel coded aperture compressive imaging system and a corresponding motion target detection algorithm in video using compressive image data are developed. Coded masks with random Gaussian, Toeplitz and random binary are utilized to simulate the compressive image respectively. For compressive images, a mixture of the Gaussian distribution is applied to the compressed image field to model the background. A simple threshold test in compressive sampling image is used to declare motion objects. Foreground image retrieval from underdetermined measurement using the total variance optimization algorithm is explored. The signal-to-noise ratio （SNR） is employed to evaluate the image quality recovered from the compressive sampling signals, and receiver operation characteristic （ROC） curves are used to quantify the performance of the motion detection algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the low dimensional compressed imaging representation is sufficient to determine spatial motion targets. Compared with the random Gaussian and Toeplitz mask, motion detection algorithms using the random binary phase mask can yield better detection results. However using the random Gaussian and Toeplitz phase mask can achieve high resolution reconstructed images.
