Video Object Segmentation Technology

With advances in communication and information processing technologies, video-driven applications show a very large degree of flexibility and extensibility. Visual communication is the fastest growing vehicle for information. Many new digital applications and services are emerging such as digital TV, teleconference, videophone, and image-based interactive multimedia. These diversified applications and services with a large amount of data demand more advanced digital signal processing techniques for efficient storage and transmission, accurate analysis, and flexible manipulation. Video object segmentation is such a kind of technique.Video object segmentation aims to partition an image sequence into moving objects and to track the evolution of the moving objects along the time axis. Many applications related to video compression and transmission, and pattern recognition rely on video object segmentation. Video object segmentation techniques are also important tools for content-based video coding and manipulation, and interactive multimedia applications. Video object segmentation usually divides the contents of a video frame into semantic regions that can be dealt as objects. These semantically segmented objects can be coded so that object-based manipulation of video content can be realized in interactive multimedia applications. For example, in the context of the MPEG-4 standard, a video is considered to consist of independently moving objects and is encoded object by object. In the MPEG-7, segmented results based on the frame-to-frame motion information or abrupt shape change can be utilized for a high-level description.This paper first presents the background of research on video object segmentation, and introduces the status in quo of this area. And then this paper lucubrates the video segmentation techniques: first, a new algorithm based on information fusion, which can be used for the segmentation of video object is proposed; then, to enhance the generality, this paper presents a technique for automatic video object segmentation based on dynamic programming; at last, as an alternative, a user-assisted segmentation of video object is proposed. The idea and content of this paper are implementing automatic and semi-automatic video object segmentation via research work on key techniques and based on video object segmentation, building several applications such as video coding, video editing, video retrieval, video conference and video understanding, and give a prospect to the further research on this area.