Automatic segmentation of moving objects for video object plane generation

The new video coding standard MPEG-4 is enabling content-based functionalities. It takes advantage of a prior decomposition of sequences into video object planes (VOPs) so that each VOP represents one moving object. A comprehensive review summarizes some of the most important motion segmentation and VOP generation techniques that have been proposed. Then, a new automatic video sequence segmentation algorithm that extracts moving objects is presented. The core of this algorithm is an object tracker that matches a two-dimensional (2-D) binary model of the object against subsequent frames using the Hausdorff distance. The best match found indicates the translation the object has undergone, and the model is updated every frame to accommodate for rotation and changes in shape. The initial model is derived automatically, and a new model update method based on the concept of moving connected components allows for comparatively large changes in shape. The proposed algorithm is improved by a filtering technique that removes stationary background. Finally, the binary model sequence guides the extraction objects of the VOPs from the sequence. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of our algorithm