Toward automatic extraction of video objects

A new technique based on feature localization is developed for segmenting and tracking objects in videos. A video locale is a sequence of image feature locales that share similar features (color, texture, shape, and motion) in the spatio-temporal domain of videos. To exploit the temporal redundancy in digital videos, two algorithms (intra-frame and inter-frame) are used to grow locales efficiently. Multiple motion tracking is achieved by tracking and performing tile-based dominant motion estimation for each locale separately. Hence, the difficulty of multiple non-dominating motions is avoided. Tests on natural videos have shown very good results.