Flow-free video object segmentation

Abstract

Segmenting foreground object from a video is a challenging task because of the large deformations of the objects, occlusions, and background clutter. In this paper, we propose a frame-by-frame but computationally efficient approach for video object segmentation by clustering visually similar generic object segments throughout the video. Our algorithm segments various object instances appearing in the video and then perform clustering in order to group visually similar segments into one cluster. Since the object that needs to be segmented appears in most part of the video, we can retrieve the foreground segments from the cluster having maximum number of segments, thus filtering out noisy segments that do not represent any object. We then apply a track and fill approach in order to localize the objects in the frames where the object segmentation framework fails to segment any object. Our algorithm performs comparably to the recent automatic methods for video object segmentation when benchmarked on DAVIS dataset while being computationally much faster.