Joint segmentation of collectively moving objects using a bag-of-words model and level set evolution

In scenes with collectively moving objects, to disregard the individual objects and take the entire group into consideration for motion characterization is a promising approach with wide application prospects. In contrast to studies on the segmentation of independently moving objects, our purpose is to construct a segmentation of these objects to characterize their motions at a macroscopic level. In general, the collectively moving objects in a group have very similar motion behavior with their neighbors and appear as a kind of global collective motion. This paper presents a joint segmentation approach for these collectively moving objects. In our model, we extract these macroscopic movement patterns based on optical flow field sequences. Specifically, a group of collectively moving objects correspond to a region where the optical flow field has high magnitude and high local direction coherence. As a result, our problem can be addressed by identifying these coherent optical flow field regions. The segmentation is performed through the minimization of a variational energy functional derived from the Bayes classification rule. Specifically, we use a bag-of-words model to generate a codebook as a collection of prototypical optical flow patterns, and the class-conditional probability density functions for different regions are determined based on these patterns. Finally, the minimization of our proposed energy functional results in the gradient descent evolution of segmentation boundaries which are implicitly represented through level sets. The application of our proposed approach is to segment and track multiple groups of collectively moving objects in a large variety of real-world scenes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.