Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Video Object Segmentation using a Priori Shape Descriptor

Since shape is regarded as one of the most important attributes of visualisation, it plays a pivotal role in semantic video object segmentation applications. One of the major objectives for the research community is to segment specific objects of interest from a video sequence using prescribed shape descriptors in a diverse range of applications from video surveillance and object tracking through to medical imaging. This paper addresses this challenge by presenting a new probabilistic spatio-temporal (PST) video object segmentation algorithm that incorporates a priori generic shape descriptor representations of particular objects in a sequence. The algorithm provides considerable improvement in perceptual picture quality compared with the existing PST segmentation technique, with the numerical analysis corroborating the superior subjective segmentation performance achieved.