A Graph-Based Foreground Representation and its Application in Example Based People Matching in Video

In this work, we propose a framework for foreground representation in video and illustrate it with a multi-camera people matching application. We first decompose the video into foreground and background. A low-level coarse segmentation of the foreground is then used to generate a simple graph representation. A vertex in the graph represents the "appearance" of a corresponding segment in the foreground, while the relationship between two segments is encoded by an edge between the corresponding vertices. This provides a simple yet powerful and general representation of the foreground, which can be very useful in problems such as people detection and tracking. We illustrate the effectiveness of this model using an "example based query" type of application for people matching in videos. Matching results are provided in multiple-camera situations and also under occlusion.