Video Segmentation Based on Motion Coherence of Particles in a Video Sequence

This work describes an approach for object-oriented video segmentation based on motion coherence. Using a tracking process based on adaptively sampled points (namely, particles), 2-D motion patterns are identified with an ensemble clustering approach. Particles are clustered to obtain a pixel-wise segmentation in space and time domains. The segmentation result is mapped to an image spatio-temporal feature space. Thus, the different constituent parts of the scene that move coherently along the video sequence are mapped to volumes in this spatio-temporal space. These volumes make the redundancy in the temporal sense more explicit, leading to potential gains in video coding applications. The proposed solution is robust and more generic than similar approaches for 2-D video segmentation found in the literature. In order to illustrate the potential advantages of using the proposed motion segmentation approach in video coding applications, the PSNR of the temporal predictions and the entropies of prediction errors obtained in our experiments are presented, and compared with other methods. Our experiments with real and synthetic sequences suggest that our method also could be used in other image processing and computer vision tasks, besides video coding, such as video information retrieval and video understanding.