Color image background segmentation and representation

This paper addresses the issues of (1) automatically segmenting color images into foreground and background regions and (2) efficiently encoding segmented background for the purpose of storage, indexing, and query in large image databases. The work was motivated by the need of automatically "populating" large image databases. The following issues are discussed in this paper: (1) the model used to approximate relatively smooth color image background, (2) the approach developed for robust extraction of model parameters, (3) color background reconstruction and segmentation. Some experimental results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach. The benefits of the method in efficient content-based encoding, indexing, and query in an image database environment are presented.