Spatiotemporal region enhancement and merging for unsupervized object segmentation

Abstract

This paper proposes an unsupervized offline video object segmentation method that introduces a number of improvements to existing work in the area. It consists of the following steps. The initial segmentation utilizes object color and motion variance to more accurately classify image pixels in the first frame. Histogram-based merging is then employed to reduce oversegmentation of the first frame. During object tracking, segmentation quality measures based on object color and motion contrast are taken. These measures are then used to enhance video objects through selective pixel reclassification. After object enhancement, cumulative histogram-based merging, occlusion handling, and island detection are used to help group regions into meaningful objects. Compared to two reference methods, greater success and improved accuracy in segmenting video objects are first demonstrated by subjectively examining selected frames from a set of standard video sequences. Objective results are obtained through the use of a set of measures that aim at evaluating the accuracy of object boundaries and temporal stability through the use of color, motion, and histograms. Copyright © 2009 K. Ryan et al.