A topic-motion model for unsupervised video object discovery

The bag-of-words representation has attracted a lot of attention recently in the field of object recognition. Based on the bag-of-words representation, topic models such as Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) have been applied to unsupervised object discovery in still images. In this paper we extend topic models from still images to motion videos with the integration of a temporal model. We propose a novel spatial-temporal framework that uses topic models for appearance modeling, and the Probabilistic Data Association (PDA)filter for motion modeling. The spatial and temporal models are tightly integrated so that motion ambiguities can be resolved by appearance, and appearance ambiguities can be resolved by motion. We show promising results that cannot be achieved by appearance or motion modeling alone.