Multi-layer spectral clustering for video segmentation

Abstract

Video segmentation with spatial priority suffers from incoherence problem, since the presegments of consecutive frames may be very different. To address this problem, this paper proposes an effective and scalable approach for video segmentation, aiming to cluster video pixels that are coherent in both appearance and motion. We build up a multi-layer graph based on multiple segmentations of the video frames, where each presegment corresponds to a vertex in the graph and each layer corresponds to the segmentation result using mean shift algorithm under specific granularity. Three types of edges are connected in the graph and the corresponding affinities are defined which convey local grouping cues of intra-frame, inter-frame and inter-layer neighborhoods. Then the task of video segmentation is formulated into graph partition, which can be solved efficiently by power iteration clustering algorithm. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.