Watershed-driven active contours for moving object segmentation

Gouze, Annabelle [UCL] De Roover, Cédric [UCL] Macq, Benoît [UCL] Herbulofi, A. Debreuve, E. Barlaud, M.

In this paper we address the problem of video segmentation. We propose a new method which combines an active contour and a watershed presegmentation. We first apply active contours to track moving objects with a basic motion criterion. Then, we eliminate the variation due to motion on the object boundaries by attracting the curve to the nearest boundaries of a watershed oversegmentation. We constrain the curve length to smooth the propagation driven by the distance to the watershed boundaries. The proposed method improves active contour segmentation and gives smoother results than watershed segmentation.