Motion segmentation by multistage affine classification

We present a multistage affine motion segmentation method that combines the benefits of the dominant motion and block-based affine modeling approaches. In particular, we propose two key modifications to a recent motion segmentation algorithm developed by Wang and Adelson. 1) The adaptive k-means clustering step is replaced by a merging step, whereby the affine parameters of a block which has the smallest representation error, rather than the respective cluster center, is used to represent each layer; and 2) we implement it in multiple stages, where pixels belonging to a single motion model are labeled at each stage. Performance improvement due to the proposed modifications is demonstrated on real video frames.