Compressed Video Spatio-Temporal Segmentation

Definition

Video spatial-temporal segmentation is used to detect and track moving objects and can be performed on uncompressed or compressed video sequences.

Most spatio-temporal segmentation approaches proposed in the literature operate in the uncompressed pixel domain. This provides them with the potential to estimate object boundaries with pixel accuracy but requires that the processed sequence be fully decoded before segmentation can be performed. Often the need also arises for motion feature extraction using block matching algorithms. As a result, the usefulness of such approaches is usually restricted to non-real-time applications. Real-time pixel-domain methods are usually applicable only on head-and-shoulder sequences (e.g., video-conference applications) or are based on restrictive assumptions (e.g., that the background is uniformly colored).

To counter these drawbacks, compressed domain methods have been proposed for spatio-temporal segmentation. In their majority, they...