Robust automatic video object segmentation with graphcut assisted by SURF features

Video object segmentation is a task to distinguish the foreground from the background in videos. Most previous research on automatic video object segmentation based on graphcut segmentation uses the motion cue and the color cue to separate the background from the foreground. Consequently, the segmentation result deteriorates when the motion and/or the color becomes disordered, which typically occurs when a moving object stops and when a light is switched on/off. This paper proposes a new automatic video segmentation method robust to unstable motion and color. To achieve robustness, the graphcut segmentation is supported by the SURF feature, which is highly invariant to the change of scale, rotation, and luminance. In particular, our method matches the SURF features between two consecutive frames and modifies the segmentation result when the matched SURF features are assigned different labels.