Segmentation by combining parametric optical flow with a color model

We present a simple but efficient model for object segmentation in video scenes that integrates motion and color information in a joint probabilistic framework. Optical flow is modeled using parametric motion with Gaussian noise. The color distribution of foreground and background is described by histograms or Gaussian mixture models. Optimization is carried out using an efficient graph cut algorithm. In quantitative experiments on a variety of video data, we demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to significant reductions in error rates compared to a state-of-the-art motion-only segmentation.