Video segmentation based on watershed algorithm and optical flow motion estimation

The video coding scheme defined by MPEG4 standard offers several content-based functionalities, demanding the description of the scene in terms of so-called video-objects. The separate coding of the video objects may enrich the user interaction in several multimedia services due to flexible access to the bit-stream and an easy manipulation of the video information. In this framework, the coder may perform a locally defined pre-processing, aimed at the automatic identification of the objects appearing in the sequence. Hence, video segmentation is a key issue in efficiently applying the MPEG4 coding scheme. This paper presents a segmentation algorithm based on watershed algorithm and optical flow motion estimation. Our simulation results show that this method is able to solve complex segmentation tasks according to luminance homogeneity and motion coherence criterion.