Automatic Segmentation of Moving Objects in Video Sequences for Indoor and Outdoor Applications

Computer vision systems have an impressive spread both for their practical application and for theoretical research. The common approach used in such systems consists of a good segmentation of moving objects from video sequences. This paper presents an automatic algorithm for segmenting and extracting moving objects suitable for indoor and outdoor video applications, where the background scene can be captured beforehand. Since edge detection is often used to extract accurate boundaries of the image's objects, the first step in our algorithm is accomplished by combining two edge maps which are detected from the frame difference in two consecutive frames and the background subtraction. After removing edge points that belong to the background, the resulting moving edge map is fed to the object extraction step. A fundamental task in this step is to declare the candidates of the moving object, followed by applying morphological operations. The algorithm is implemented on a real video sequence as well as MPEG-4 sequence and good segmentation results are achieved.