Spatio-temporal Quasi-Flat Zones for Morphological Video Segmentation

In order to face the various needs of users, user-driven segmentation methods are expected to provide more relevant results than fully automatic approaches. Within Mathematical Morphology, several user-driven approaches have been proposed, mostly relying on the watershed transform. Nevertheless, Soille (IEEE TPAMI, 2008) has recently suggested another solution by gathering puzzle pieces computed as Quasi-Flat Zones (QFZ) of an image. In this paper, we study more deeply this user-driven segmentation scheme in the context of video data. Thus we also introduce the concept of Spatio-Temporal QFZ and propose several methods for extracting such zones from a video sequence.