Object contour extraction using color and motion

A new approach to the extraction of the contour of a moving object is presented. The method is based on the integration of a motion segmentation technique using image substraction and a color segmentation technique based on the split-and-merge algorithm. The advantages of this method are: it can detect large moving objects and extract their boundaries; the background can be arbitrarily complicated and contain many non-moving objects occluded by the moving object; and it requires only three image frames that need not be consecutive, provided that the object is entirely contained in each of the three frames. The method is applied to a large number of color images of vehicles moving on a road and a highway ramp. The results are promising. The moving object boundaries are correctly extracted in 66 out of 73 test image sequences. The authors describe how this contour can be used as an input to a recognition system that classifies the vehicles into five generic categories. Of the 73 vehicles, 67 are correctly classified