Automatic object extraction and reconstruction in active video

A new method of video object extraction is proposed to automatically extract the object of interest from actively acquired videos. Traditional video object extraction techniques often operate under the assumption of homogeneous object motion and extract various parts of the video that are motion consistent as objects. In contrast, the proposed active video object extraction (AVOE) approach assumes that the object of interest is being actively tracked by a non-calibrated camera under general motion and classifies the possible movements of the camera that result in the 2D motion patterns as recovered from the image sequence. Consequently, the AVOE method is able to extract the single object of interest from the active video. We formalize the AVOE process using notions from Gestalt psychology. We define a new Gestalt factor called "shift and hold" and present 2D object extraction algorithms. Moreover, since an active video sequence naturally contains multiple views of the object of interest, we demonstrate that these views can be combined to form a single 3D object regardless of whether the object is static or moving in the video. (C) 2007 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.