A Multi-Mode Video Object Segmentation Scheme for Wireless Video Applications

This paper presents a new multi-mode video object segmentation scheme to automatically segment head-and-shoulder objects from a video sequence. The proposed system supports two modes of segmentation: intra-mode and inter-mode. The intra-mode segmentation integrates skin detection, facial feature localization and verification, object shape approximation, split-and-merge region growing, and object region selection and guarantees good performance of the proposed segmentation scheme. The inter-mode object segmentation makes use of background modeling and subtraction to take advantage of temporal correlation of video frame while increasing the robustness of the segmentation and speeding up the performance. The main contributions of the proposed method includes: (i) a robust and efficient background modeling in inter-mode object segmentation, (ii) a facial feature verification and a multi-face separation algorithm in intra-mode segmentation. The performance of the algorithm is illustrated by simulation results carried out on various head-and-shoulder video sequences.