A hybrid algorithm for automatic segmentation of slowly moving objects

Segmentation of moving objects in video sequences is a basic task in many applications. However, it is still challenging due to the semantic gap between the low-level visual features and the high-level human interpretation of video semantics. Compared with segmentation of fast moving objects, accurate and perceptually consistent segmentation of slowly moving objects is more difficult. In this paper, a novel hybrid algorithm is proposed for segmentation of slowly moving objects in video sequence aiming to acquire perceptually consistent results. Firstly, the temporal information of the differences among multiple frames is employed to detect initial moving regions. Then, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is employed and an improved expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is introduced to segment a spatial image into homogeneous regions. Finally, the results of motion detection and spatial segmentation are fused to extract final moving objects. Experiments are conducted and provide convincing results. (C) 2011 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.