FPGA implementation of real-time growcut based object segmentation for chroma-key effect

This paper presents FPGA implementation of realtime object segmentation which is applied for Chroma-key effect. In order to implement hardware architecture for real-time segmentation, we propose a method which has two stages consisting of seed selection and modified GrowCut. In the first stage, K-Means clustering method and edge detection are applied to specify automatically seed pixels of the object and the background. In the second stage, GrowCut algorithm which has been modified for real-time processing is applied to label the rest of pixels based the seed pixels. The hardware architecture of the proposed method is designed and implemented on Bitec Cyclone III development kit. The experimental result shows that our system can perform real-time object segmentation on HD videos.