Semi-Automatic Semantic Object Extraction for Video Coding

A semi-automatic algorithm to extract the semantic video object in image sequences is proposed. Different schemes are used to get the initial video object in the first frame and other frames of a sequence. In the first frame, two polygons are input by the user to specify the area in which the object boundary is located. Then the video object is extracted automatically based on only the first frame. In the following frames, the image frame is segmented into intensity homogeneous regions. The moving regions are detected by a morphological filter, non-moving regions are selected by the object model from the previous frame. These regions form the initial video object. In each frame, after the initial object is available, the edges which belong to the video object of interest are selected by a local object contour model. Finally, an active contour model (snake) is applied to extract the final object contour.