Hardware/Software Partitioned Implementation of Real-time Object-oriented Camera for Arbitrary-shaped MPEG-4 Contents

Recently developed MPEG-4 part 2 compression standard provides a novel capability to handle arbitrary video objects. To support this capability, an efficient object segmentation technique is required. This paper proposes a real-time algorithm for foreground object segmentation in video sequences. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps: the first step that segments a frame into several sub-regions using spatio-temporal watershed transform and the second one that extracts a foreground object segment from the sub-regions generated in the first step. For real-time processing, the algorithm is partitioned into hardware and software parts so that computationally expensive parts are off-loaded from a processor and executed by hardware accelerators. Simulation results show that the proposed implementation can handle QCIF-size video at 15 fps to extract an accurate foreground object