A modified Hierarchical graph cut based video segmentation approach for high frame rate video

摘要

Video object segmentation entails selecting and extracting objects of interest from a video sequence. Video Segmentation of Objects (VSO) is a critical task which has many applications, such as video edit, video decomposition and object recognition. The core of VSO system consists of two major problems of computer vision, namely object segmentation and object tracking. These two difficulties need to be solved in tandem in an efficient manner to handle variations in shape deformation, appearance alteration and background clutter. Along with segmentation efficiency computational expense is also a critical parameter for algorithm development. Most existing methods utilize advanced tracking algorithms such as mean shift and particle filter, applied together with object segmentation schemes like Level sets or graph methods. As video is a spatiotemporal data, it gives an extensive opportunity to focus on the regions of high spatiotemporal variation. We propose a new algorithm to concentrate on the high variations of the video data and use modified hierarchical processing to capture the spatiotemporal variation. The novelty of the research presented here is to utilize a fast object tracking algorithm conjoined with graph cut based segmentation in a hierarchical framework. This involves modifying both the object tracking algorithm and the graph cut segmentation algorithm to work in an optimized method in a local spatial region while also ensuring all relevant motion has been accounted for. Using an initial estimate of object and a hierarchical pyramid framework the proposed algorithm tracks and segments the object of interest in subsequent frames. Due to the modified hierarchal framework we can perform local processing of the video thereby enabling the proposed algorithm to target specific regions of the video where high spatiotemporal variations occur. Experiments performed with high frame rate video data shows the viability of the proposed approach.