Standalone Objective Evaluation of Segmentation Quality

The identification of objects in video sequences, i.e. video segmentation, plays a major role in emerging multimedia interactive services, such as those enabled by the ISO MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards. In this context, assessing the adequacy of the identified objects to the application targets, i.e. the evaluation of segmentation quality, assumes a crucial importance. Video segmentation technology has received considerable attention in the literature, and several algorithms have been proposed to address various types of applications. However, the segmentation quality performance evaluation of those algorithms is often adhoc, and a well-established solution is not available. In fact, the field of objective segmentation quality evaluation is still maturing, and recently some efforts have been made, mainly following the MPEG object-based coding and description developments. This paper discusses the problem of objective segmentation quality evaluation in its most difficult scenario: standalone evaluation, i.e. when a reference segmentation is not available for comparative evaluation. In particular, objective metrics are proposed for the evaluation of standalone segmentation quality for both individual objects and the overall segmentation partition.