AN AUTOMATIC SEGMENTATION METHOD FOR MOVING OBJECTS BASED ON THE SPATIAL-TEMPORAL INFORMATION OF VIDEO

• Published in: Journal of electronics (China) Vol. 22; no. 5; pp. 498 - 504
• Main Authors: Xie, Mei, Luo, Ling
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: School of Electronic Engineering, UESTC, Chengdu 610054, China 01.09.2005
• Subjects: MPEG-4; 滤波器; 空间时间分割; 自动分割法; 视频编码; 运动补偿; Motion compensation; Spatial-temporal segmentation; Strong filter; Watersheds
• ISSN: 0217-9822; 1993-0615
• DOI: 10.1007/BF03037007

The new MPEG-4 video coding standard enables content-based functions. In order to support the new standard, frames should be decomposed into Video Object Planes （VOP）, each VOP representing a moving object. This paper proposes an image segmentation method to separate moving objects from image sequences. The proposed method utilizes the spatial-temporal information. Spatial segmentation is applied to divide each image into connected areas and to find pre~：ise object boundaries of moving objects. To locate moving objects in image sequences, two consecutive image frames in the temporal direction are examined and a hypothesis testing is performed with Neyman-Pearson criterion. Spatial segmentation produces a spatial segmentation mask, and temporal segmentation yields a change detection mask that indicates moving objects and the background. Then spatial-temporal merging can be used to get the final results. This method has been tested on several images. Experimental results show that this segmentation method is efficient.