A generic video analysis and segmentation system

A generic video analysis system for supervised and unsupervised segmentation is described. The idea behind the presented concept is to integrate different advanced segmentation techniques to obtain a robust, efficient and modular segmentation system for natural video and still images. The system entails several independent modules. Each one of these modules encapsulates a complete video processing technique The intermediate results obtained from each single module are merged and further processed by a set of intelligent rules to achieve a highly accurate final segmentation. The modular structure of the system allows it to be extended continuously and with ease by adding new independent modules. The intermediate segmentation results of newly added modules are linked to the other system results via the rule processor. A user friendly graphical interface (GUI) is also provided. The functionality of the GUI is twofold: it serves as input interface to pass processing parameters to the system and as semi-automatic segmentation tool for user interaction and manually refinement of automatically generated segmentation masks. Selected results obtained with the current version of the video analysis system are reported.