Content based representation of colour image sequences

A procedure is described for the spatiotemporal segmentation and tracking of objects in colour image sequences. For this purpose, we propose the novel procedure of the k-means with a connectivity constraint algorithm as a general segmentation algorithm combining several types of information including colour, motion and compactness. A new colour distance is also defined for this algorithm. The regularisation parameters are evaluated automatically using the min-max criterion. In this algorithm, the use of spatiotemporal regions is introduced since a number of frames is analyzed simultaneously and as a result the same region is present in consequent frames. Experimental results on real and synthetic colour data demonstrate the performance of the data