A robust and efficient scale-space based metric for the evaluation of MPEG-4 VOPs

New MPEG-4 functionalities require the segmentation of input video into different layers (VOPs). Usually, these layers contain arbitrarily shaped objects representing meaningful content of the video stream. With the introduction of the new functionalities in MPEG4, the need of objective and subjective assessment of segmented image quality has emerged. In this paper we introduce an efficient and reliable metric to evaluate segmentation results by comparing them with a given ground truth. Beyond this application the proposed technique can be used for real-time shape description and retrieval in the context of the emerging MPEG7, as well as in general pattern recognition tasks. Selected results obtained by using this metric within these application areas are reported