A fast automatic VOP generation using boundary block segmentation

With the increase of multimedia applications and content-based functionalities, efficient video coding methods are necessary. The moving picture experts group-4 (MPEG-4) provides content-based functionalities by introducing the concept of the video object plane (VOP). Each frame of the input sequence is segmented into a number of arbitrarily shaped image regions or VOP's so that each VOP describes a semantically meaningful object or video content of interest. For real-time applications of MPEG-4, a fast automatic object segmentation method of video sequences is needed. We propose a fast automatic VOP generation algorithm composed of two parts: object block segmentation and boundary block segmentation. The former defines block-based object regions in a frame and the latter generates the pixel-based object mask. Block-based object region search and restriction of segmentation regions to boundary blocks reduce a computational load. Experimental results with two test sequences show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of the visual quality of segmentation results and the computation time. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.