Simultaneous alpha map generation and 2-D mesh tracking for multimedia applications

We propose a semi-automatic alpha-map generation method, where video object boundaries that are marked interactively on some key-frames are tracked in all other frames using only YUV data to generate alpha-maps. We use a 2-D triangular mesh to represent and track video objects. One of the major problems in alpha plane generation by object tracking is the detection and classification of uncovered regions due to object motion and self-occlusion (especially in the presence of out-of-plane rotations). The proposed method can identify uncovered regions and then classify them as belonging to the object of interest or not based on color and motion similarities