Segregation of moving objects using elastic matching

We present a method for figure-ground segregation of moving objects from monocular video sequences. The approach is based on tracking extracted contour fragments, in contrast to traditional approaches which rely on feature points, regions, and unorganized edge elements. Specifically, a notion of similarity between pairs of curve fragments appearing in two adjacent frames is developed and used to find the curve correspondence. This similarity metric is elastic in nature and in addition takes into account both a novel notion of transitions in curve fragments across video frames and an epipolar constraint. This yields a performance rate of 85% correct correspondence on a manually labeled set of frame pairs. Color/intensity of the regions on either side of the curve is also used to reduce the ambiguity and improve efficiency of curve correspondence. The retrieved curve correspondence is then used to group curves in each frame into clusters based on the pairwise similarity of how they transform from one frame to the next. Results on video sequences of moving vehicles show that using curve fragments for tracking produces a richer segregation of figure from ground than current region or feature-based methods.