Geometric-guided label propagation for moving object detection

Moving object segmentation in video has uses in many applications and is a particularly challenging task when the video is acquired by a moving camera. Typical approaches that rely on principal component analysis (PCA) tend to extract scattered sparse components of the moving objects and generally fail in extracting dense object segmentations. In this paper, a novel label propagation framework based on motion vanishing point (MVP) analysis is proposed to address the challenges. A weighted graph is constructed with image pixels as nodes and the MVP-guided approach is used to define the graph weights. Label propagation is then performed by incorporating the graph Laplacian. In addition, a PCA result is used to initialize the foreground/background labels. Experiments on the Hopkins data set of outdoor sequences captured by a hand-held moving camera demonstrate that the proposed label propagation method outperforms state-of-the-art PCA and spectral clustering methods for a dense segmentation task. Moreover, the framework is capable of correcting mislabeled foreground pixels and thus does not require accurate initial label assignment.