Segmentation of Moving Objects

This paper describes a new method for segmentation of moving objects. The segmentation is done in two steps. First a segmentation of a displacement vectorfield leads to rough contours of the objects. Since a displacement vectorfìeld provides information about the strenght and direction of a movement, it is possible to separate moving objects (moving differently) from each other or from the background. In the second step these rough contours are refined. Within a search area around the contours found in the first segmentation step, the ‘best boundary’ is determined by optimizing a criterion for a ‘good boundary’ with the A*-algorithm. The computational cost is acceptable, because the search areas are very small compared with the whole picture. In contrast to methods based on difference images, it is shown that a separation can be achieved even if the moving objects touch each other or the scene is taken with pan.