IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

The new video coding standard MPEG-4 is enabling content-based functionalities. It takes advantage of a prior decomposition of sequences into video object planes (VOPs) so that each VOP represents one moving object. A comprehensive review summarizes some of the most important motion segmentation and VOP generation techniques that have been proposed. Then, a new automatic video sequence segmentatio... View full abstract»

This paper describes a three-dimensional (3-D) model-based unsupervised procedure for the segmentation of multiview image sequences using multiple sources of information. The 3-D model is initialized by accurate adaptation of a two-dimensional wireframe model to the foreground object of one of the views. The articulation procedure is based on the homogeneity of parameters, such as rigid 3-D motion... View full abstract»

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has become one of the most active research areas in the past few years. Many visual feature representations have been explored and many systems built. While these research efforts establish the basis of CBIR, the usefulness of the proposed approaches is limited. Specifically, these efforts have relatively ignored two distinct characteristics of CBIR systems: (1... View full abstract»

We present a prototype video analysis and retrieval system, called NeTra-V, that is being developed to build an object-based video representation for functionalities such as search and retrieval of video objects. A region-based content description scheme using low-level visual descriptors is proposed. In order to obtain regions for local feature extraction, a new spatio-temporal segmentation and r... View full abstract»

A novel block-based image segmentation algorithm using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion is proposed. The conditional probability in the MAP criterion, which is formulated by the Bayesian framework, is in charge of classifying image blocks into edge, monotone, and textured blocks. On the other hand, the a priori probability is responsible for edge connectivity and homogeneous region continu... View full abstract»

This paper presents a technique for unsupervised video segmentation. This technique consists of two phases: initial segmentation and temporal tracking, similar to a number of existing techniques. However, new algorithms for spatial segmentation, marker extraction, and modified watershed transformation are proposed for the present technique. The new algorithms make this technique differ from existi... View full abstract»

We present a scheme for interactive video segmentation. A key feature of the system is the distinction between two levels of segmentation, namely, regions and object segmentation. Regions are homogeneous areas of the images, which are extracted automatically by the computer. Semantically meaningful objects are obtained through user interaction by grouping of regions according to the specific appli... View full abstract»

We present the application of a simplified shape analysis technique based on a modal representation of the object shape, and which is useful for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of shape-driven searches in image databases. The proposed method computes the representation of an object by means of modes very similar to the deformation modes of a mechanical system, but in a numerically more ... View full abstract»

After performing a thorough comparison of different quantization schemes in the RGB, HSV, YUV, and CIEL*u*v* color spaces, we propose to use color features obtained by hierarchical color clustering based on a pruned octree data structure to achieve efficient and robust image retrieval. With the proposed method, multiple color features, including the dominant color, the number of distinctive colors... View full abstract»

The rapidity with which digital information, particularly video, is being generated has necessitated the development of tools for efficient search of these media. Content-based visual queries have been primarily focused on still image retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel, interactive system on the Web, based on the visual paradigm, with spatiotemporal attributes playing a key role in video... View full abstract»

This paper introduces a novel semantic video object extraction system using mathematical morphology and a perspective motion model. Inspired by the results from the study of the human visual system, we intend to solve the semantic video object extraction problem in two separate steps: supervised I-frame segmentation, and unsupervised P-frame tracking. First, the precise semantic video object bound... View full abstract»

Following an overview of two-dimensional (2-D) parametric motion models commonly used in video manipulation and compression, we introduce trifocal transfer, which is an image-based scene representation used in computer vision, as a motion compensation method that uses three frames at a time to implicitly capture camera/scene motion and scene depth. Trifocal transfer requires a trifocal tensor that... View full abstract»

This paper presents a method to track multiple nonrigid objects in video sequences. First, we present related works on tracking methods. Second, we describe our proposed approach. We use the notion of target to represent the perception of object motion. To handle the particularities of nonrigid objects we define a target as an individually tracked moving region or as a group of moving regions glob... View full abstract»

This paper presents an automatic system for analyzing and annotating video sequences of technical talks. Our method uses a robust motion estimation technique to detect key frames and segment the video sequence into subsequences containing a single overhead slide. The subsequences are stabilized to remove motion that occurs when the speaker adjusts their slides. Any changes remaining between frames... View full abstract»