Unsupervised pixel-level video foreground object segmentation via shortest path algorithm

Unsupervised video object segmentation is to automatically segment the foreground object in the video without any prior knowledge. In this paper, we propose an object-level method to extract the foreground object in the video. We firstly generate all the object-like regions as the segmentation candidates. Then based on the corresponding map between the successive frames, the video segmentation problem is converted to corresponding graph model, which selects the most corresponding object region from each frame. The shortest path algorithm is explored to get a global optimum solution for this graph. To obtain a better result, we also introduce a global foreground model to restrict the selected candidates. Finally, we utilize the selected candidates to obtain a more precise pixel-level foreground object segmentation. Compared with the state-of-the-art object-level methods, our method does not only guarantee the continuity of segmentation result, but also works well even under the cases of fast motion and occlusion. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.