A novel spatio-temporal video object segmentation algorithm

Video object segmentation is a key technology in video processing, which is the foundation of the newly object-based video compression standard MPEG-4. A novel spatio-temporal video object segmentation algorithm is proposed in this paper, which is very efficient to acquire the video object moving in a static background. Firstly, video sequence is segmented with change detection algorithm to get segmentation result in temporal domain. Secondly, the spatial segmentation result is obtained by a segmentation algorithm based on local thresholds, which means each pixel in the image has its own threshold. In this algorithm, the threshold of a pixel in an image is estimated by calculating the mean of the grayscale values of its neighbor pixels, and the square variance of the grayscale values of the neighbor pixels is also calculated as an additional judge condition. Thirdly, the video object is extracted by spatio-temporal integration video segmentation algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed spatio-temporal integration video object segmentation algorithm can extract the moving object in a video sequence with a static background accurately and efficiently.