Estimation of video object's relevance

With the advent of the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards [2, 3], a further impulse to the representation and description of multimedia information has been given. In particular, object-based coding and description are nowadays possible (or about to become so). In both object-based coding and description environments the estimation of video object's relevance can be very useful since it has a major role in segmentation quality evaluation, which is responsible for selecting the appropriate segmentation algorithm to use for identification of the objects to work with [1]. Object relevance information is also very valuable for the rate control module of an object-based coder. In description creation, relevance can be used directly as an object descriptor, or indirectly to ensure that more relevant objects receive more detailed and complete descriptions. Recognizing the importance of object relevance estimation, this paper proposes an objective metric, automatically calculated, for video object relevance evaluation, both when objects are considered individually and within a given context.